Re: SW Best Practices WG - draft charter for discussion

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Guus Schreiber wrote:

>Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>
>OK. I will make the timeline for task forces 2-6 months. Having said
>that, I think it would be good to focus on "low-hanging fruit": things
>that can realistically be achieved in a short time frame.

Fair enough.

>>
>> An interesting aspect of work for this group might also be in the
>> visualisation and manipulation of Semantic Web information - although it is
>> unlikely that we could produce Recommendation Track work along these lines,
>> exploring different ways of representing the information to users might be a
>> great help in developing tools that people other than specialists can use
>> with comfort. One interesting aspect of this work is in developing
>> representations of queries, that can be formulated by people without learning
>> a syntax designed for a machine. While XML, N3 and so on are human-readable
>> by comparison to compiled java byte-code, they are still for the technically
>> inclined who are prepared to learn them - potentially excluding a vast number
>> of creators or users of RDF applications.
>
>Sounds very interesting, but unless there is some particular method that
>has been worked on and used, it is likely to be too much
>research-oriented and therefore outside the scope of this WG. BTW I see
>the work on the relationship to UML as visualization support.

Indeed UML might be considered. There are also the approaches to presenting
information used in IsaViz/RDFAuthor/GraphViz etc, presenting things as
tables, etc. I was thinking more in terms of collectng the different
approaches in use - something that might take a month - as a useful source of
ideas for ways to build interfaces.

cheers

Chaals