Hi Ted, Very cool collection of ships... :-) It's funny that before I released Exhibit I wanted to make an example exhibit of ships from the data on Wikipedia but didn't have time, and now you've made one!
Exhibit is good for about 50 - 500 items. 50 items are more than a person can visually process and mentally keep track of, and so faceted browsing starts to pay off. But these numbers are not based on any serious profiling, and much depends on each user's browser and machine, too. There are ways to improve performance: - avoid facets that have low counts and thus many choices, e.g., the Shipname facet has only "1" for each choice and so in total it has 289 choices - set ex:showAll="false" on the tile view so that only the first 10 items are shown at the beginning - make the lens templates simpler, if possible; use CSS classes instead of inline styles And I'm speeding up various parts of Exhibit in version 2.0. The bottleneck is in the dynamic UI generation and then in the faceted browsing calculations. Longwell predates Exhibit and was designed for a slightly different audience. Exhibit was designed to lower the barrier to publishing structured data, and toward that goal we have explored a few ideas like HTML-based configuration of views and HTML-based lens templates. These ideas will be moved back into Longwell eventually. Hopefully we'll be able to support a smooth transition from Exhibit to Longwell as your data sets grow. Precisely how that might work we don't know yet. But that transition itself is, I believe, a contribution to the Semantic Web: people should not pay huge overhead of hosting server-side web apps when they only want to publish about a few dozen things. In the early days of the Web, publishing to the Web only required coding up a few static HTML pages and we want to making publishing on the Semantic Web as easy. It's only when your data sets grow will you start to pay in terms of learning, time, etc. Have I answered your questions? David Ted Bell wrote: > Greetings > > Exhibit's facetted browsing is fantastic and I've managed to create a > small example: > >> http://bbpress.navyhistory.org.au/nhsaships09.htm > > The size of the JSON file is 142KB (289 ships); an earlier version > with just 14 ships was 7KB. > I'd like to add data for 2 additional facets - "era" & "major > battles" - I guess that would bump the file size up to 160-odd KB. > I took the graphics out of the main tile page in order to speed up > loading. > > Question: > >> Is there a sweet spot for data volumes/properties for Exhibit? > >> At what stage (of data volumes) should users stop using Exhibit and > start using Longbow? > >> Which brings me to... why develop 2 products (Longbow and Exhibit) > that "seem" do the same thing (albeit with different data volumes)? > > Ted Bell > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > [email protected] > http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general > _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
