Re: Semantic Bank as document repository frontend

From: David Huynh <dfhuynh_at_csail.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 12:07:15 -0500

As a starter, you can already browse Firefox to a local directory and
click the data coin icon. Don't point it at root, it might take a while.

David

Rickard Öberg wrote:

> Hey
>
> I have already had off-list discussions with Stefano about using
> Semantic Bank for the purpose of indexing OpenOffice Calc spreadsheets
> as RDF data (see http://jroller.com/page/rickard/20051030 for a
> description of the end result). That worked very well, and I will
> continue to tweak that solution into something that we will actually
> use internally for all sorts of purposes.
>
> My next idea, which I want to bounce off of you lot, is to take the
> same idea but apply it to OpenOffice Writer documents. Essentially,
> create a daemon that crawls a file server and extracts RDF data from
> the files into the Semantic Bank (e.g. take the URL, creator, title,
> keywords as tags, folder names as tags, etc.). Once that is done it
> would be possible to browse and query the semantic bank for documents,
> and once found a link to the local file system (which will be a file
> server) can be presented. That would be really nice, and trivial to
> implement considering that I already have the Calc implementation
> described in the blog entry.
>
> However, my next idea after that is to present the Semantic Bank using
> WebDAV instead of as a web UI. Basically, the root of the repository
> would contain folders representing the different types of objects.
> When a type is selected (i.e. a folder is browsed into) the next level
> of subfolders would be the list of predicates for that type (e.g.
> "Creator", "Tag", "Title", etc.), and once selected it would show the
> next level of subfolders as the possible values (e.g. as subfolder of
> "Creator" you would have "Rickard" and as subfolder of "Created on"
> you would have "2005-10-25"). For each level you would see only the
> next set of possible folders to use as filter. It would probably do
> the same kind of optimization as the web UI, i.e. if there's LOADS of
> documents then first show "2005" as folder, then "October" as
> subfolder, and then "25". This could be done relatively dynamically.
>
> Only when the magic folder "show X documents", which is always there
> and where X is the number of documents in the result, is selected will
> the actual documents be displayed, and when clicked the WebDAV servlet
> will go to the URL of the document, and fetch and send it to the user.
>
> Something like that. Basically this will provide a queryable and
> browsable document repository which really doesn't care where the
> documents are stored. They could be on hundreds of different servers
> for all you know. It's only purpose is to aggregate them so that they
> can be found easily. By using a "WebDAV to Explorer" tool like
> WebDrive the end result will look just like a regular hard drive or
> file server to the user.
>
> Whaddyathink? Is this something that has already been done? Would it
> be useful? etc.
>
> Any comments are welcome. I'll probably implement it in any case, if
> only because it should be relatively easy to do so :-)
>
> /Rickard
Received on Mon Oct 31 2005 - 17:01:32 EST

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