David, your prototype is impressive! I'm not surprised that you've been thinking about such functionality, but I would have expected it in Longwell rather than Exhibit. As you point out in that mailinglist thread, which I previously missed, the expressiveness might me too big for casual users. Especially since Exhibit has a declarative way of configuring the UI I wonder if such expressiveness is needed there.
But this expressiveness can be very handy when handling huge datasets. But then I feel like there is still a lot of expressiveness missing. For example, the possibility to "open" different paths/strands from one list of resources, e.g. from people to papers->tracks AND from people to schools->countries... And of course, these paths/strands could then be merged again. I very much like your "group by" feature. Very neat. I would have expected a possibility to add connected facets instead (adding a people->schools facet to the papers view), like you demonstrated in your graph-based-Exhibit demo. I wonder if the group-by solution would work with multiple strands...? Cheers, Georgi -- Georgi Kobilarov www.georgikobilarov.com > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:general- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Huynh > Sent: Sunday, December 02, 2007 5:59 PM > To: General List > Subject: Re: UIs for the Semantic Web - browseable facets > > Georgi, > > You are correct, and timely, in pointing out the need for what you > called resource list browsing. Indeed, having worked on Longwell in > 2005, I anticipated that same need and started to work on a UI > prototype > in early 2006. That prototype was recently discussed in this thread: > > http://simile.mit.edu/mail/ReadMsg?listId=10&msgId=22681 > > Our Exhibit users are starting to voice demand for such functionality, > and I'm thinking of ways to introduce it with minimal cost of > complexity > to the Exhibit UI. > > David > > Georgi Kobilarov wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > since convincing approaches for interacting with very large (web > scale) > > graph-based dataset are still lacking, I would like to start a > > discussion on this topic here. > > > > It seems to me that currently single-resource/instance centric data > > browsers like Tabulator, Zitgist or Disco still live in the mindset > of > > the current document-centric web, where users primarily look at one > > resource (person, project, company, etc.) at a time. Hence, they > compete > > for usefulness with the document centric web itself, a battle that's > > hard to win. If I want to publish data about my friends, my projects, > my > > publications, etc. then I publish it on my homepage and provide links > to > > their web pages. Why use RDF for that? > > > > In my opinion Semantic Web technologies help solving problems of > > data-aggregation, and that's an area which is closely related to > today's > > business intelligence tools and multi-dimensional databases. That is > > resource-list centric. > > > > But current resource-list centric approaches like faceted browsers > > (Longwell/Exhibit) lack a browsing capability and hence don't scale > for > > very large datasets from a UI perspective. > > > > Therefore, I'd like to discuss the idea of browseable facets, which > > enables browse lists of resources (facets). > > I made a small demo available here: > > http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de:8800/uberblic/pivot/ > > > > please note it's just a prototype and quite buggy. > > > > Select a type from the tagcloud on the left-hand side to start with > and > > the domain of facets you want to look at from the tagcloud on the > right > > hand side. Then hit the "explore" link to pivot the view around a > facet. > > > > I'm looking forward to hearing your opinion. > > > > Cheers, > > Georgi > > > > -- > > Georgi Kobilarov > > www.georgikobilarov.com > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > General mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general > > > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > [email protected] > http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
