Re: Javascript 'Schema-Aware' RDF Editor

Hello everyone,

I didn't get round to writing more about the editor, but I have
improved it quite a lot since the original mail and I've now made a
beta release of it under an x11 style license.
The new version supports bnodes, editing multiple stores and contains
better facilites for searching and editing resources. It doesn't
support datatypes or literal-locales yet.

The release requires python (for the cgi web server) and has been
tested on windows and linux. It's very simple to set up (run server.py
and point a browser at http://localhost:8000/rdfview.html).  
It can also be installed as a cgi script on apache.

I'd be interested in what people think of the editing gui. I had a bit
of trouble coming up with a workable editor, and in the end plumped
for editing one resource at a time, with a 'search the schema for
appropriate properties and display editboxes for them' approach.

It has really been designed for incrementally editing a store rather
than creating a lot of RDF from scratch, and I had my team at work in
mind when I wrote it: we have a few rdf files lying around for
configuring various applications - I wanted an editor that they could
use to tweak them over the intranet without getting their hands dirty
with rdf/xml syntax.

The current release contains a simple cgi backend that reads and
writes to files. It's quite slow because the cgi reads 3 or 4 rdf
files per click, but most stuff is rendered in a second or so. I
intend to write a backend for sesame at some point, and have designed
the interface with the idea of manipulating data from a large store


You can try the editor at:

http://phildawes.net/2004/03/rdfedit/rdfview.html


You can download the 0.1 beta release from:

http://www.sf.net/projects/rdfintranet


N.B. I also found the rdfschema generator below really useful. It
means you can get an RDF file, generate an RDF schema from it and then
edit it using my web tool!:

http://progos.hu/tools/og/index.html


Hope this is useful to somebody! - please let me know of any ideas you
have on how the interface could be improved etc...

Cheers,

Phil





Phil Dawes writes:
 > 
 > Hi All,
 > 
 > I've been meaning to write a generic web-based rdf editor for some
 > time, and this weekend I made a start on it. Point your browser at:
 > 
 > http://www.phildawes.net/2004/03/rdfedit/
 > 
 > It's basically a load of dhtml connected to a javascript RDF store
 > (originally based on Jim Ley's javascript code[1], but hacked up quite
 > a bit now). 
 > The serverside is currently a simple python cgi that reads files and
 > serves ntriples in response to canned queries (using the excellent
 > rdflib[2]). It's designed to be switched for a better RDF store, but
 > this is a prototype.
 > 
 > The javascript is currently hardcoded to point at a phil.rdf file, and
 > a foaf.rdf schema, and is quite slow because the cgi loads the rdf in
 > each request (and each page is ~2 or 3 requests).
 > 
 > I've tested it with Mozilla 1.4 and IE 6. IE seems to have problems
 > with rendering when adding multiple statements with the same property,
 > but apart from that it seems to work. 
 > 
 > I'm going to bed now - I'll mail a bit more tomorrow about how it
 > works and how it could be extended (and hopefully solicit suggestions
 > for improvement).
 > 
 > Good night,
 > 
 > Phil
 > 
 > 
 > [1] http://jibbering.com/rdf-parser/
 > [2] http://rdflib.net/
 > 
 > 

--

Received on Wednesday, 24 March 2004 12:45:46 UTC