Re: What Happened to the Semantic Web?

On 12 October 2017 at 21:56, Sean B. Palmer <sean@miscoranda.com> wrote:

> Hi Melvin,
>
> > https://github.com/solid/solid
>
> Thanks for the link to this! Somebody also pointed me to it in #swig,
> and so I have already been looking at it. Have you ever played with
> Tabulator?
>
> https://github.com/linkeddata/tabulator


Yes, tabulator is now built into solid which allows the browser to become a
tabulator style data browser (editor) via a shim.

The shim is called mashlib :

https://github.com/linkeddata/mashlib


>
>
> Those who know their history will recognise it as the direct
> predecessor of Solid. At the same time I was also working on something
> similar called Arcs (which wasn't very good, and I doubt there are
> many surviving references to it). These were both produced around 2005
> to 2007, if I recall correctly, but long before all this Seth Russell
> had been working on something called Sailor that did much the same
> thing. Solid is therefore the fourth attempt that I know of, and there
> may be others--there was a mailing list for this stuff too which may
> contain further examples:
>
> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-semweb-ui/
>
> Sadly, the concept overall has not been very popular.
>


Mashlib is based on solid app set and solid ui :

https://github.com/linkeddata/solid-app-set

https://github.com/linkeddata/solid-ui


>
> Anyway, I did sign in and try Solid. The profile app displayed an
> empty page so I was unable to make progress there. The Friends app
> asked me to log in with my WebID, even though I'd just signed in, but
> then the "Sign In" button didn't do anything anyway. The Bookmark app,
> which is hosted on Heroku, was very slow to load but I got there
> eventually. When I gave that my WebID it responded with a JavaScript
> error and then "Couldn't install your bookmarks container". Clicking
> on "More apps" just took me to Github, so overall I was unable to try
> a single app yet. I do recognise what you said about bugs though;
> clearly you're in the early stages!
>

Thanks for this feedback, very valuable.  Ive passed it on.

Well done for signing up! :)

Ah yes, good catches.  These apps were designed for the previous version of
solid, we will have to fix this over time, or remove the links.

However if you click on one of the folders, say the folder named "public"

You will get a view of tabulator / mashlib (which we need to document a bit
more)



>
> One thing I did was to look through the specs to see what
> serialisations you allow. I couldn't find any full enumeration, though
> I did find this:
>
> "Solid uses several serialization syntaxes for storing and exchanging
> RDF such as Turtle and JSON-LD."
>
> https://github.com/solid/solid-spec/blob/master/content-representation.md
>
> I was unable to find N3 anywhere, which I thought somewhat significant.
>

We dont fully support n3, but pretty much everyone working on solid wants
to.  e.g. Tim, Eric, Ruben, myself are all n3 fans

Ruben did manage to get a patch to allow n3 patches, in our last version


>
> In general I am wondering what TimBL thinks will be different with
> Solid compared to Tabulator. Does he think, for example, that the web
> stack has now progressed significantly enough that many of the things
> that he wanted to implement in Tabulator that were difficult or
> impossible at the time can now be added to Solid?
>

The main thing here is that tabulator was a browser extension, this can
also be a shim.  It could even run natively in the browser.

Another thing is that each class has it's own UI.  But the user can choose
which UI they prefer, meaning an app market for rendering.


>
> I've always had a soft spot for applications like Sailor, Tabulator,
> and even Arcs. In general I think that the Semantic Web should have
> started from those and then developed technologies in response to the
> needs of the users of those systems. Instead they were written in a
> post hoc manner, and attracted few users, so those requirements never
> really became evident through real world usage scenarios and were
> never really reflected in the technologies that we got so far.
>

It's starting to work!  Have a look at your public folder, try creating a
new chat pane.

Post the link here, or join us on gitter :

https://gitter.im/solid/chat

And we can play around with realtime chat in the browser, or notepads,
meetings, playlists and more.

This stuff is working, if a bit buggy and undocumented.  We hope to change
that over time, but are a small team going step by step. :)


>
> --
> Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/
>