Re: Display/Stylesheet Vocabulary for RDF Browsers

From: David R. Karger <karger_at_mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 01:13:22 -0400

I'm trying to continue to catch up on this discussion.

Reading this particular mail, I'm hobbled by my weakness at reading
raw n3. Is there a tool for switching it to e.g. a circles and arrows
diagram with labels/descriptions in the circles?

However, one particular question does come to mind. Chris vocabulary
at least appears to build-in the assumption that the target output of
the display vocabulary is html. I don't know if I'm comfortable with
this. Does it mean I'm going to need a whole different vocabulary to
produce output for a rich client like Haystack (eg, one that will be
used to manipulate the data and not just look at it, so needs support
for rich graphical interaction like drag and drop)?
  I would prefer to factor out the portion of lenses that are "output
format independent" at least to some extent. For example, which
properties to display in a lens can clearly be talked about in a
format independent way. Which properties of a given class can be
thought of as a "title" for objects of the class can too. Even
notions of rows and columns in a table seem more general than just
html.
  As a sound bite, I'd argue for separate ontologies of _what_ to show
and _how_ to show it.

I also have a sense that e.g. FOAFLenses.n3 is repeating a feature of
Haystack that I think may have been mistaken, of trying to describe
the intended output html in RDF, when it is probably a lot easier on
the developer to define the html in html---e.g., to use some kind of
scripting with fill-in-the-blanks for rdf values.
Received on Thu Sep 23 2004 - 05:16:36 EDT