solvent + semantic bank comments

From: Michael McDougall <mcdougall_at_grammatech.com>
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:27:39 -0500

A couple of comments based on a weekend of messing around with Simile tools:

- This morning was the first time I used Solvent/Piggy Bank to solve a
problem in my real life (as opposed to using it to play around with
technology). I converted a list of DMV inspection sites to RDF and then
used the Google maps screen to pick a nearby location.

- Solvent has increased my use of Piggy Bank tenfold. I now (somewhat
perversely) convert non-HTML data (eg. flat text files) to HTML and then
use Solvent to convert to RDF so I can get the address->coordinates
lookup. In fact, almost all my Piggy Bank usage is directed at getting
data onto a Google map. Not sure if that was your intention, but there
you go.

- This may be a mistaken impression on my part, but you guys seem to be
putting a lot of PR effort into Piggy Bank while keeping quiet about
Semantic Bank. I think Semantic Bank deserves at least as much PR as
Piggy Bank. I think it has more potential for take-up and rapid
return-on-investment, at least for those of us who do a lot of work in
intranet environments. With Semantic Bank, an enterprise only needs one
semweb enthusiast to set up an intranet bank and then the rest of the
enterprise can get on board gradually as they use the shared bank
without having to install anything. I first started thinking this way
when I saw the ISWC bank; I'm guessing that the number of people who
installed Piggy Bank at ISWC were dwarfed by the number of people using
the ISWC Semantic Bank.

- I'd like to see Semantic Bank be able to gather data without a Piggy
Bank client -- for example, it would be nice to be able to insert N3 and
RDF/XML directly (by pasting into a text-window or uploading a file)
instead of using Piggy Bank. (Maybe it does this now, but I couldn't see
how to do it.)


Michael
Received on Mon Dec 05 2005 - 15:21:05 EST

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