Re: RDF Schema Explorer (Querying/Validating/Extending RDF models)

(+cc: Geoff Chappell)

Hi Wolfram,

On Mon, 30 Oct 2000, Wolfram Conen wrote:

> Hello all!
> 
> Here is something that may complement some other interesting services
> (like Redland):
> 
> RDF Schema Explorer  at   http://wonkituck.wi-inf.uni-essen.de/rdfs.html

Very neat :-)

Did you ever see the 'Enabling Inferencing' page at mozilla.org?

http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/inference.html

One of the projects there is Geoff Chappell's 'Mozillation' system, which
embeds the ever-useful SWI-Prolog engine inside the Netscape/Mozilla
browser, encapsulated behind the RDFDataSource API augmented with an
'addRules(ruletext, rulemimetype)' method. (I've used the same trick in
Java to glue SilRI behind a simple Java RDF API while exposing some logic
capability).

Mozillation (http://209.198.94.130/mzpl/) might be an interesting
environment for your RDF Schema Explorer idea; it's client side and has
access to browser user interface widgets etc. We can do similar 
things using Javascript[1] in Internet Explorer too, though the existence
of RDF APIs and services in Mozilla adds some extra possibilities. (I've a
feeling Geoff had SWI-Prolog running as an ActiveX component in IE at one
point, though maybe  I'm mis-remembering...)

I'm going to try to persuade Dave to wrap SWI-Prolog behind a Redland
interface (er... hi Dave :-) for similar reasons. I'm particularly
intrigued by SWI's abiility (see [2]) to talk to relational
databases, though not sure in practice how that'd interact with the
problems you outline re querying RDF using Prolog's standard resolution
algorithm.

One other thought. For folk more familiar with SQL than Prolog, it would
be nice to expose an SQL-ish query interface along the lines of 
http://web1.guha.com/rdfdb/query.html -- though I guess that's a separate
piece of work really...

Dan

[1] eg. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf-dev/rudolf/js-rdf/overview.html
[2] http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bit/1116/PrologSQL.html
also XSB of course does this, 
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~sbprolog/manual2/

Received on Tuesday, 31 October 2000 07:10:15 UTC