Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Welkin

Welkin: A General-Purpose RDF Browser "Many consider the Semantic Web to be vaporware and others believe it's the next big thing. No matter where you stand, a question always pops up: Where is the RDF browser? The SIMILE Project, a joint project between W3C, MIT and HP to implement semantic interoperability of metadata in digital libraries, released today the first beta release of a general purpose graphic and interactive RDF browser named Welkin (see a screenshot), targetted to those who need to get a mental model of any RDF dataset, from a single RSS 1.0 news feed to a collection of digital data."

Welkin Homepage.

1 comment:

Matthew said...

Another bloody graph-based viewer.

Nobody I know thinks in graphs. My wife reminded me last night that I only really know about 4 people (and to be fair a couple of them might actually think in graphs) but I'm pretty sure *I* don't think in graphs.

What I really want to see is a browser with some sort of 'plug-in's for relationship types. The basic relationships I would expect to come out of the box are 'Contains', 'Is followed by', 'Below', 'Peer'.

The next feature required is to be able to lock down some visualisations and relationships. For example I might define a framework containing a number of locked down visualisations (say some boxes to put stuff in) and some locked down relationships (give everything with a 'Type' attribute of 'Platform' a 'Contains' relationship joint to the locked down Platform visualisation I have placed on the framework).

The brower could then produce something a little more meaningful. Contradictions within rules could be shown with movement (alternate between the two contradicting relationships and redraw).

In the above example I could throw data at the framework and it could sort it. Then I could overlay the graph-based representation as used by this Welkin thingie. Because items would already be constrained I'd be able to actually get some meaningful information from the damn visualisation!!!