Re: web of data: how to include forms?

François-Paul,

related work:  TopBraid Composer [1] has a mechanism to express forms in 
a forms ontology [2].  Composer can be used to customize the contents 
and layout of the forms [3], and then a forms interpreter is used to 
render them into the target platform (e.g. into Eclipse SWT or the Ajax 
user interface of the upcoming TopBraid Live).  This for example allows 
you to specify that "firstName" shall appear to the left of "lastName".

While the current implementation of this is optimized to define 
renderings of RDF-based data, I think it is easy to imagine similar 
approaches for traditional HTML forms.

Regards,
Holger

[1] http://www.topbraidcomposer.com
[2] http://www.topbraid.org/2007/01/forms.owl
[3] 
http://composing-the-semantic-web.blogspot.com/2006/12/topbraids-form-layout-editor.html


François-Paul Servant wrote:
> Quoting Tim Berners-Lee [1]:
> "The Semantic Web [...] is about making links, so that a person or 
> machine can
> explore the web of data."
> 
> Beside "href" links, forms are an important feature of the hypertext 
> web. How does this translate to the web of data? How would you include 
> "forms" in an RDF
> document? Is there a standard way to do it? An ontology describing forms?
> 
> The purpose would to enable a Tabulator-like application to know when it 
> has to
> display a form to the user.
> 
> [Why do I ask? I'm prototyping a car repair application including 
> diagnostic and
> technical documentation. It's supposed to be used by humans and programs.
> Conceptually, acces to the technical documentation looks very much like
> navigating a web of data. But forms cannot be avoided: for instance, the
> application may have to ask for technical characteristics of the car being
> repaired (in order to filter accordingly the list of documents to be 
> returned) ;
> a user may have to enter results of diagnostic tests.]
> 
> Best Regards
> 
> François-Paul Servant
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
> 
> 
> 
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Received on Thursday, 11 January 2007 17:19:20 UTC