Re: RDF to HTML templating

I had an idea for an HTML template with RDF something like four years ago.
I asked the question of the Semantic Web Interest Group people, but no one
seemed to have ever thought of rendering RDF into structured data, which I
thought strange, or they directed me to Fresnel, which is strictly
presentational, it's not converting anything to consumable data, but just
presenting it, not much differently than a CSS stylesheet.

My idea is more akin to XSLT, I it in an earlier message:
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdfjs/2013Oct/0041.html>

The idea is that we use RDFa with bnodes/variables to do value substitution
into HTML documents, with some additional elements to do things like
looping over result sets, control structures, and such.

The upshot is that you can parse the RDFa document and get back the exact
same RDF statements that were used to generate it. That is just so awesome,
I think.

I had an implementation in the form of a modified Jade parser for Node.js.
It worked... barely. The source is here:
<https://github.com/Acubed/magnode/blob/master/lib/transform.JadeRDFa.js>
(it's been unused for so long it probably doesn't work anymore)

I'd like to see this formalized, though I'm not sure it would be in our
scope to adopt work on such a TR, but we could certainly discuss
implementations and informally work on libraries, see what works, and
document suggestions.

Austin.

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 9:04 AM, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>   I have a quick question:
>
>  Is there a simple RDF to HTML templating library?
>
> We have developed an initial PointedGraph library for
> rdflib [1],  and would like to have a function such as
>
>    template.apply(pg,template)
>
> which would bind the pointed graph to a template.
> I imagine this could be best done with an RDFa
> template, but I don't know what the issues with
> this are. I am quite open to other suggestions too.
>
> I have seen Vie, but this seems to require a whole
> framework. It would be nice to have a library dedicated
> to just this functionality, so that one can use it with
> different libraries, or develop our own.
>
> All the best,
>
>         Henry Story
>
>
> [1]
> https://github.com/stample/rww-play/blob/withPointedGraph/public/ldp/lib/pointedGraph.js
>    We'd like to then have an rdfstore implementation for this later.
>
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>
>
>