Re: RDFViz update: SVG and VRML RDF visualisations

One of the neat things in SVG is that it provides a way of describing things
in XML that can be understood graphically (which is a fairly common way of
unerstanding things for a lot of people). THe neat thing about this is that
we can then use RDF to describe all kinds of things about the SVG beyond what
can be done in the format itself.

On the other hand, SVG is a good format for creating self-describing
graphics. If you start from RDF, it should be possible to add a lot of the
information directly into the SVG, and create accessible representations that
do not require more interpretation of the underlying RDF.

I hope to have some time to sit around and play with this stuff some more
soo. If anyone wants to look at some stuff on SVG acessibility that grew out
of the ability to use RDF to provide more accessibility for SVG,
http://www.w3.org/1999/09/SVG-access is a draft for a note on the topic (and
feedback is very welcome...)

In general, accessibility and a semantic web go hand in hand - the key is
being able to understand information and represent it in different
presentation media, and a semantically rich web is the way to make that
happen...

cheers

Charles McCN

On Tue, 4 Apr 2000, Dan Brickley wrote:

  
  Quick note to say thanks for the interest in RDFViz, the GraphViz based
  tool for laying out RDF graphs for display. 
  
      http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf-dev/rudolf/rdfviz/
  
  Thanks to the work of Stephen North and the other GraphViz folk,  RDFViz
  can now generate simple SVG and VRML visualisations of RDF data graphs.
  I didn't do much to take advantage of this for RDFViz except provide a
  web-based wrapper for  the -TSVG and -TVRML command line flags :-)
  
  When I'm happy with a version 1.0 of RDFViz I'll get a copy hosted on a
  W3C box and bundle up the scripts. In the meantime I was hoping to set
  people thinking about RDF, SVG, VRML... All of these can be represented in
  XML (not sure about status of the VRML in XML work though). We can go
  to SVG and VRML from XML/RDF data graphs (either using RDF 1.0 syntax,
  other RDF-like syntaxes such as SOAP, or XSLT transformations. Question
  is: can we go the other way, ie. extract the abstract structure from an
  SVG or VRML diagram...? 
  
  This is where Semantic Web screenscraping [1] meets Web Accessibility... 
  Once everyone uses XML for everything, what more can we say about the
  abstract structures that are common across our various uses of
  XML? eg. Could an organisational chart in SVG or VRML be self-describing
  enough to allow applications to extract the RDF model it represents?
  
  Dan  (hoping to prompt a reply from the WAI folks...)
  
  
  
  [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2000Mar/0103.html
   
  

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Tuesday, 4 April 2000 19:43:26 UTC