Re: Visualising Web Services?

On Sun, 22 Jul 2001, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> Having spent a couple of hours familiarising myself with GraphViz
> [1], I can't help but wonder how it could be used to help visualise
> Web Services.
>
> For example, it seems like it would be fairly straightforward to
> write an XSL stylesheet that transformed a WSDL file to a .dot file,
> to represent a directed graph of all of the components of the
> service. The flow languages also offer some interesting
> opportunities here.
>
> Has anyone attempted this? I might give it a try if not, anyone
> wishing to help appreciated (as my XSLT skills are still young, as
> is my practical experience with WSDL... let's not even talk about
> spare time ;).

semi-related:

	http://ilrt.org/discovery/2000/09/metamesh/
	Search Mesh Topology and Visualisation

I wrote a brief doc on something like this last year, though more under
the "distributed search" than "Web Services" banner. Rather than drive
GraphViz directly, my experiment was based around using an edge-labelled
graph representation of distributed search meshes (aka RDF), and then
feeding the RDF to GraphViz to visualise. This was pretty easy as there
are a bunch of RDF-to-GraphViz tools out there, (eg my [2] or [3]). If you
want to express a more sophisticated mapping between the data view and the
pretty picture view, you might take a look at Dan Connolly and Tim
Berners-Lee's work on visualising the W3C Roadmap diagrams[4].  Unlike my
demo which simply generates a GraphViz view of an edge-labelled graph,
theirs takes some data, and some mapping rules which explain how various
constructs in the data are to be visualised. Pretty cool, especially if
you have an SVG viewer...

--danbri

> [1] http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/

[2] http://www.rdfviz.org/
[3] http://www.w3.org/RDF/Implementations/SiRPAC/
[4] http://www.w3.org/2001/02pd/
    http://www.w3.org/2001/04/roadmap/

Received on Sunday, 22 July 2001 23:24:07 UTC