Re: How to integrate semantic web in a real application

On Thursday 01 December 2005 19:37, Fabien Schwob wrote:
> I'm quite interested in the web semantic and I have already tried to
> used each part of it (OWL, XML, RDF) independently. But now, I would
> like to go a little further. My goal is to integrate the semantic web
> in a new web site I'm developing.

Very nice!

> The project is a small web site which make a list of video games
> players and allow the user to search them with various criteria. How
> can I do that ?

SPARQL will be your friend! :-)

> I've tried to think about it but it's not very clear 
> in my mind. Here is some of the ideas I've found :
>
> - Modeling the domain using OWL : what is a constructor, what is a
> game, what is a game type, etc. But what can I do with this file ?
> Making query : it's really like a DB, so what's the advantage of
> using OWL ?

Well, you do not mention what kind of tools that you have available, but 
there is a bunch of us over in Perl-land who think in the following 
terms:

We have a number of so-called "Model-View-Controller" frameworks. MVC is 
an old application development paradigm, but works nice. Over in Perl 
land, there's Catalyst, which has a lot of momentum and SAWA (pretty 
much unpublished), as well as other frameworks that can be made as MVCs 
without much problems. Now, the idea is that you don't store files, RDF 
combined with one of the libraries becomes the _model_ of the MVC. RDF 
has also a query language, you can add statements to the model and so 
forth, so it does a lot of things for you.

I haven't actually done this yet, but others have, and what we have in 
mind is to use Redland in the bottom, configure it to use any of the 
Redland storages, when you query the model, you get data back as a 
result set, that you transform and present to your users.

The advantages are great: You can perform any queries SPARQL allows, and 
that's a lot. You can expose all data, so anybody can use them for 
whatever they like, and you yourself can easily add foreign sources to 
your model. 

Enabling users to search amounts to provide an UI for people to use to 
formulate those SPARQL queries, because you cannot expect most users to 
be able to formulate their own queries. 

So, this becomes a semweb application all the way.

Now, I guess this response may be a bit overwhelming, because it 
introduces a lot of concepts that you may not be familiar with. Also, I 
haven't had time to actually do this, nevertheless, I think it is an 
architecture with a great potential, and therefore I'd like to 
encourage you to look further in this direction.


Best,

Kjetil
--
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
kjetil@kjernsmo.net
Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/     OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC

Received on Thursday, 1 December 2005 22:22:57 UTC