Re: [hcls] User interfaces for writing / querying RDF: Leeet

Since we are talking about user interface, another thing we might want 
to consider is the possible intersection of web 2.0 and semantic web 
(some people call it web 3.0 :-) )  in terms of semantic mashup of 
scientific data and tools. Current web 2.0 technologies (e.g., flickr, 
myspace, ...) provide great ways of mashing things up over the web 
because of its ease of use and its leverage of existing web 
technologies. I think it would be great if we can somehow combine the 
ease of use and semantic richness provided by web 2.0 and semantic 
technologies, respectively to build useful applications for scientific 
users (killer apps?!). To this end, I'm thinking yahoo pipes as an 
example. One can use yahoo pipes to create workflow (integrating data 
and tools) graphically. It works for url, csv (comma separated values), 
feeds, atoms, xml, etc, but not rdfs, owl, ontologies, lsid, etc.  
Wouldn't it be nice if we can merge something like yahoo pipes with 
semantic web?

Cheers,

-Kei

Matthias Samwald wrote:
>   
>> Note that it's impossible to answer the intended query above without  
>> SPARQL-DL - and the most intuitive syntax for this kind of query in  
>> SPARQL-DL may not be triple-based, cosmeticised or not. E.g. "ALL  
>> astrocyte develops_from SOME ?"
>>
>> I am heavily biased towards TBox queries - for ABox queries, a  
>> syntactic patina over SPARQL may be very welcome.
>>     
>
> At the moment I am thinking about ways of expressing subsets of OWL DL
> in a way that is more easily mapped to the RDF triple model. I simply
> cannot accept how complicated and sometimes unintuitive the
> representation of certain OWL constructs in RDF is, although I really
> tried to. For example, we could have a convention that the triple
> "Class1 property1 Class2" could be interpreted as as 'some values from'
> restriction. Of course, not all of OWL could be represented in such a
> simplified RDF format (e.g., how would we represent 'all values from'?).
>
> Yes, I know that we can create OWL APIs and dedicated OWL query
> languages to make it work. However, I think that technologies should
> have a certain 'elegance' to find widespread adoption. If we look at
> some of our HCLS ontologies, we are seeing a XML document that
> represents a RDF graph in an unnecessarily complicated and error-prone
> way. And if we look at the RDF graph we see that it represents an OWL
> ontology in an unnecessarily complicated and error-prone way. A
> developer that is new to all these technologies might get the impression
> that the Semantic Web layer cake [1] is just a heap of bad compromises
> and failed attempts of creating compatibility. 
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:W3c-semantic-web-layers.svg
>
> cheers,
> Matthias Samwald
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 13 September 2007 12:49:38 UTC