Fwd: [ANN] LENA: Lens-based RDF Browser

Sorry to repost something from a list many of you are already  
subscribed to; however, this seems like it warrants some specific  
discussion on this list.

I know many of you have been wrapping various biological datasources  
as RDF - I have been doing the same, using the usual suspects such as  
R2RQ and Sesame. The end result is usually an impenetrable SPARQL  
endpoint or opaque HTML or Ajax based triple browser. Exposing  
triples may be fine if you've got some simple FOAF data, but it's  
hardly an ideal way of presenting complex biological data.

It would be nice to have an agile way to generate non-brittle domain- 
specific views of our RDF. The Fresnel/Lens approach seems a  
reasonable first step (in my ideal world SWRL and/or some OWL based  
query language would be the core technology here, but it's early days  
yet).

Is it too soon to propose working together on a core set of HCLS Lenses?

Begin forwarded message:

> Resent-From: semantic-web@w3.org
> From: Thomas Franz <franz@uni-koblenz.de>
> Date: October 10, 2007 2:43:40 AM PDT
> To: semantic-web@w3.org, people@semanticdesktop.org
> Cc: Jörg <jmkoch@uni-koblenz.de>
> Subject: [ANN] LENA: Lens-based RDF Browser
>
>
> Dear Semantic-Web and Semantic-Desktop enthusiasts,
>
> I'm pleased to announce the first official release of LENA [1], a
> Fresnel Lens based RDF Navigator with SPARQL selector support.
>
> [1] http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/Research/lena
>
> A demo is available here: http://dom.uni-koblenz.de:8080/lena
>
> LENA stands for LEns based NAvigator. A lens represents a particular
> view onto RDF data and is described by the Fresnel Display Vocabulary
> [2]. LENA enables viewing RDF data in your web browser, rendered
> according to the lens descriptions you provide. LENA supports the  
> use of
> multiple lenses and indicates if they are available for a resource, so
> that a different view onto the same data is always just one click  
> away!
>
> To write lenses for complex RDF structures, LENA supports SPARQL
> selectors. While SPARQL [3] is a designated Fresnel selector language,
> an implementation did not yet exist. LENA provides an extension to
> support Fresnel SPARQL selectors that is now integrated into the  
> Simile
> Fresnel engine [4].
>
> The data which shall be processed by LENA, can either be put into the
> provided directory or be accessed through a Sesame [5] HTTP  
> repository.
> For more information about the usage of LENA see the project page [1].
>
> Work on LENA was funded by the X-Media project (www.x-media- 
> project.org)
> sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information  
> Society
> Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-026978.
>
> [1] http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/Research/lena
> [2] http://www.w3.org/2005/04/fresnel-info/
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
> [4] http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Fresnel
> [5] http://www.openrdf.org/
> -- 
> Thomas Franz
> ISWeb, University of Koblenz
> http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/People/Franz
>
>

Received on Thursday, 11 October 2007 05:10:14 UTC