Results of todays meeting

From: Chris Bizer <bizer_at_gmx.de>
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 15:50:38 -0500

Hi Stefano and Emmanuel,

we had an interesting meeting with David Karger today, focusing mostly on
the intermediate format a Fresnel engine could produce.

Because Haystack supports editing data, they need the URIs of instances to
be passed to their widgets so that they can update the underlying RDF
repository if necessary.

This wasn't included in the intermediate format I proposed 2 days ago, but
is no problem to add.

This thought lead us into the direction, that it might be a good idea to
implement one Fresnel rendering engine that would provide all Fresnel
functionality and output an intermediate tree.

This tree could then be used by Longwell, Haystack, IsaViz and Cocoon to
render whatever they like. Meaning that the tools would share as much code
as possible.
I'm not implementing, so it is not my business, but looks like an
interesting idea.

Seen on an abstract level (not XML), the tree would be a tree of RDF nodes,
where each node has a set of CSS styling instructions attached to it. Pretty
general and the kind of input all four tool need.

I will update the documentation and the RDFS vocabularies now and freeze the
stuff afterwards.
I will be in New Jersey over Easter and will be back on Wednesday afternoon.
I guess that I'm online only occasionally till then.

David Karger will read the manual in detail until next Thursday and we will
meet with him then again to see if he found stuff that would make it
impossible for Haystack to use Fresnel. He and I don't think so, but we will
see.

I will fly back to Berlin next Saturday, so I will basically be at MIT only
two more days (next Thursday and Friday). Maybe I will spend some time on
defining such an intermediate language then, so just see how the Fresnel
issue list looks next week ;-)

Cheers

Chris
Received on Thu Mar 24 2005 - 20:50:51 EST