Re: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data
I tend to think that contemporary graph-based data browsers either fly the user at 50,000 feet and show her the whole world in one window below (render a huge data graph as a huge visual graph), or leave her at the street level to wander around on foot (single resource view). i tend to think of this differentiation as browsers for ontologists and real people respectively. graph visualisations etc are typically used by people working on ontologies, as opposed to people that are doing typical information seeking activities, like they would on google. I think parallax is potentially the nearest thing to a semantic web application that my mom could and maybe would use. I'm just wishing to provide her a car. Perhaps the good thing is that the car doesn't come with a destination built in. (It'd be quite bad in real life if you need different cars to go grocery shopping and to go to work, for example.) David -- n - max wilson e - [EMAIL PROTECTED] w - www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mlw05r t - +44 (0) 2380 598367 --
Semantic Web UI Workshops (was RE: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data)
Hi Georgi, David, all, I'm also not aware of any upcoming semweb UI workshops. WWW2009 might be a good place... VinhTuan Thai, Siegfried Handschuh and I submitted a proposal for a workshop at IUI2009 under the title Visual interfaces to the Social and the Semantic Web (with several members of this discussion on the proposed Programme Committee). I hope is the kind of event you have in mind :) We'll get the response on the 5th September. If the proposal is successful I hope that many of these exciting developments will be submitted to the workshop. Chris and I have also already agreed to propose a second Linked Data on the Web workshop at WWW2009, so again I hope we'll be successful, and hope to see many interesting interface papers there too. Cheers, Tom.
Linked Data Visualization Platforms; Different Approaches
Hi, I was trying to hold back... but isolation is killing me. I guess we are social in nature. Some of you know I spent quite some time working on a visualization platform. Part of it was built on a Java / processing hybrid and surfaced through a thin ( flash ) client using some pretty complex streaming tricks ( think VNC ). It looks nothing like the UIs you are working on, although conceptually we went down similar paths. Since we stood on a much more solid platform, with infinite tools at hand and infinite local *processing ;)* power, it was easier to experiment ( we didn't rely on the client, Ajax, etc ) and we moved forward faster. You can say I cheated ;) Now, with the advent of Flash/Flex/AIR and the other RIA platforms ( Silverlight, JavaFX and maybe even Gears ), similar power will eventually be available on the client side. ( forget about having powerful and modular Javascript for a while, things are not looking nice[1] ) I guess my point is: consider breaking FREE OF THE RULES and use all the tools to experiment ( even if they break some standards, you can then come back ). There are infinite paradigms to experiment with. Some pointers: A very nice vis newcomer in Flex: SpatialKey [2] My incipient RDF framework for the Flash platform [3] I am not saying you don't know that there are other ways to do this. Just that you should reconsider the benefits of using a better framework... even if it is only for research. Back to the Haystack days perhaps. Imagine how fast faceted browsing can be with a co-located triple store feeding a specially crafted federated querying engine. Processing on the edge. Best, A [1] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/003400.html [2] http://www.spatialkey.com/ [3] http://www.semanticflash.org/ -- Aldo Bucchi +56 9 7623 8653 skype:aldo.bucchi http://aldobucchi.com/ http://univrz.com/
Re: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data
On 2008-08 -19, at 21:27, David Huynh wrote: The trouble is of course when the whole web is the database, it's hard to suggest those relationships (connections) for a set of entities. How might one solve that problem? I suppose something like Swoogle can help. Is that what Tabulator uses to know what data is on the SW? Swoogle? Centralized index? No, not at all. The Tabulator is a browser for linked data. The convention for linked data is that if I do a GET on the URI identifying something, the returned information will include the incoming and outgoing links that a reasonable person might be interested in following. Linked data clients dereference any URIs they have not come across before, and pick up either data directly or clues as to where to find what more data. So at each point, you know what the options are leading on. When you pick up a set of related things, of course, there will be some presidents who have children and some who don't. And there will be some presidents which a have bunch of obscure properties. Especially once you have overlaid data from many sources. So then there may be a case for having lenses linked from ontologies to allow one for example to focus on geneology or political career. It gets more complicated when you try to automatically build an interface for allowing people to input data about a president, chose which fields to offer. I'd like to see the Freebase data as linked data on the web ... then we could try all our other UIs on the same data! What would it take to put in some shim interface to Freebase? Tim PS: There are places where a centralized index will help though, like finding people's FOAF page from their email address.
RE: Semantic Web UI Workshops (was RE: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data)
Hi Daniel, Sure, very happy to. It's at (on a temporary basis at least): http://tomheath.com/tmp/iui2009-proposal-vissw.pdf Apologies in advance to all those whose names were 'taken in vain' in the provisional PC, which we will likely extend aswell if the proposal is successful. Interested to hear any comments/feedback. Cheers, Tom. (on behalf of VinhTuan, Siggy and myself) -Original Message- From: Daniel Park [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 20 August 2008 11:05 To: Tom Heath Cc: Georgi Kobilarov; David Huynh; public-lod@w3.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Semantic Web UI Workshops (was RE: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data) Can you share the description of this proposal for further understanding ? --- Daniel Park [at] Samsung Electronics. Standard Architect, blog.naver.com/natpt --- Original Message --- Sender : Tom Heath[EMAIL PROTECTED] Date : 2008-08-20 18:57 (GMT+09:00) Title : Semantic Web UI Workshops (was RE: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data) Hi Georgi, David, all, I'm also not aware of any upcoming semweb UI workshops. WWW2009 might be a good place... VinhTuan Thai, Siegfried Handschuh and I submitted a proposal for a workshop at IUI2009 under the title Visual interfaces to the Social and the Semantic Web (with several members of this discussion on the proposed Programme Committee). I hope is the kind of event you have in mind :) We'll get the response on the 5th September. If the proposal is successful I hope that many of these exciting developments will be submitted to the workshop. Chris and I have also already agreed to propose a second Linked Data on the Web workshop at WWW2009, so again I hope we'll be successful, and hope to see many interesting interface papers there too. Cheers, Tom.
Re: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data
Hello, On Wednesday 20 August 2008 12:51:21 Giovanni Tummarello wrote: This might also work : ;) http://sindice.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2FPeople%2FBerners-Lee% 2Fcardqt=term but so far i am not aware of a linked data browser that uses any search engine to get more data, they all just follow links which have been explicitly put in the RDF i think this would be very interesting thing to see the links from others as well. i picture this in the form of a get more info button or a background ajax call which could make such button pop up there is more.. I have recently added URI based search support to the Semantic Web Client Library [1]. In addition to dereferencing URIs, the library can now query Sindice for RDF documents that mention the URIs. We are preparing a new release. Since the Disco browser [2] is implemented on top of the Semantic Web Client Library it should be straightforward to extend Disco the way you suggest. Furthermore, the Marbles browser [3] queries Sindice too. [1] http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/ng4j/semwebclient/ [2] http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/ng4j/disco/ [3] http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Marbles Regards, Olaf --- Olaf Hartig DBIS Group Institut für Informatik Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Re: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data
Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
On 2008-08 -19, at 21:27, David Huynh wrote:
The trouble is of course when the whole web is the database, it's
hard to suggest those relationships (connections) for a set of entities.
How might one solve that problem? I suppose something like Swoogle
can help. Is that what Tabulator uses to know what data is on the SW?
Swoogle? Centralized index? No, not at all. The Tabulator is a browser
for linked data.
The convention for linked data is that if I do a GET on the URI
identifying something, the returned information will include the
incoming and outgoing links that a reasonable person might be
interested in following. Linked data clients dereference any URIs
they have not come across before, and pick up either data directly or
clues as to where to find what more data. So at each point, you know
what the options are leading on.
When you pick up a set of related things, of course, there will be
some presidents who have children and some who don't. And there will
be some presidents which a have bunch of obscure properties.
Especially once you have overlaid data from many sources. So then
there may be a case for having lenses linked from ontologies to allow
one for example to focus on geneology or political career.
It gets more complicated when you try to automatically build an
interface for allowing people to input data about a president, chose
which fields to offer.
I'd like to see the Freebase data as linked data on the web ... then
we could try all our other UIs on the same data! What would it take
to put in some shim interface to Freebase?
Tim
PS: There are places where a centralized index will help though, like
finding people's FOAF page from their email address.
David,
Which brings us back to the initial point: expose the URIs (you've done
this partially) to Linked Data aware agents :-) This, as I've already
indicated, comes down to:
1. Replace all javascript:{} with their actual Freebase URIs (which
already exist)
2. Use an information resource to collate all the URIs that are in scope
at a given point in time in you UI, and then expose the resource URI via
link rel=dc:source ../ (you can use RSS, Atom, OPML for this, the
key thing is to list the URIs)
By doing the above, your Visualization oriented information resource and
the data sources behind remain Linked Data Web accessible.
Anyway, you've already met me half way (re. yesterday's comments), so
I'll crack on with my bit: showing how your interface can provide a
beachead for launching a SPARQL Full Text query (without the user
writing any SPARQL or seeing any RDF in plain sight).
Tim et al:
There is a first cut of the last but one Freebase dump in Linked Data
form (to the degree attainable) at:
http://linkeddata.openlinksw.com:8891/sparql (the graph URI for SPARQL
FROM is : http://linkeddata.openlinksw.com/freebase# )
We are working with Francois Belleau (of http://bio2rdf.org) to produce
an updated release, but even that release is going to require some work
in order for the graph to be totally coherent (*a long story*).
Also note, we are RDFizing Freebase on the fly and producing slightly
better Linked Data, so if I go to
http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/browse.html?type=%2Fgovernment%2Fus_president
and simply do a View | Linked Data Sources via the ODE XPI's context
menu against a President's Freebase URI I get: http://tinyurl.com/6pxetc .
To conclude, we have Linked Data in two forms for the Freebase Data Space:
1. Their Quad Dumps transformed into RDF and then loaded into Virtuoso
resulting in a SPARQL endpoint and a Linked Data Space
2. Linked Data generated on the Fly via our RDFization cartridges with
proxy URIs used as mechanism for endowing the resulting Linked Data
Space with dereferencable URIs
Tim: Tabulator should work with either.
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
freebase parallax open-sourced
Hi all, As there seems to be some interest in Freebase Parallax, Metaweb has open-sourced it. Please find the code here: http://code.google.com/p/freebase-parallax/ Grab app/trunk/ and then point your browser to src/index.html. As I'm working on trunk/, you might find it safer to get tags/release-200808/ instead. The code doesn't have much, if any, documentation, but don't hesitate to ask me :-) David
Need some freebase parallax or tabulator help here, save lives doing so Re: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data
I've been following the posts a little, while downloading excel format data on emergency medical services across the US. We need to have these data examined in forty eleven different ways and we need to know what peculiar combinations exist for different locations to keep people alive. It seems to me that these data sets that are available for downloading, as long as you agree to a few restrictions to protect privacy and understand these data are not perfect, yet, and analyses of your choice. Look, I'm including below the notice sent out today to the NEMSiS list, and would like to know if you decide to tackle the data with freebase, how are you doing it, and where you will post your results. The reality now is that we need what the members of the list are working on applied to these data sets. The data sets, and their natural relationship data sets are going to continue to grow. Dwight Hines St. Augustine, Florida = Greetings from the NEMSIS Technical Assistance Center: We are pleased to announce that the NEMSIS National Reporting System based upon the National EMS Data Base is available! The web-based system can be found on the NEMSIS web site (www.nemsis.org) under the NEMSIS Reporting tab (click on “National Reports”). We invite you to visit and use the reports and, most importantly, provide us feedback regarding their usefulness. We are striving to provide you the best possible product and need to hear from you to enhance the impact of the national reports on the EMS system as a whole. It should be noted that there are limitations to the data that are available. First, these data are not “population-based” and do not represent conditions of the nation or any individual state submitting data to NEMSIS (i.e., most states currently submit a portion of all state EMS runs). Second, the data are not formally “cleaned” and, therefore, represent the information as submitted by each state. Although basic cleaning is completed by the NEMSIS TAC, some data inconsistencies are retained to aid states with quality assessments. We welcome you to use and become familiar with the national reports. As the data base grows, so will the usefulness and validity of the National EMS Data Base. David J. Owens Program Director National EMS Information System University of Utah - Department of Pediatrics Intermountain Injury Control Research Center 295 Chipeta Way PO Box 581289 Salt Lake City, Utah 84158-1289 Phone: (801) 585 1631 Fax: (801) 581-8686 [EMAIL PROTECTED] The NEMSIS Technical Assistance Center exists to standardize data collection and develop a national registry to facilitate evaluation of emergency medical services. On Aug 20, 2008, at 1:32 PM, M.Daquin wrote: The trouble is of course when the whole web is the database, it's hard to suggest those relationships (connections) for a set of entities. How might one solve that problem? I suppose something like Swoogle can help. Is that what Tabulator uses to know what data is on the SW? David
Re: Modular Browsers (was RE: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data)
Aldo Bucchi wrote: HI, Scanning the thread on Parallax I see some terms reoccurring: Outgoing Connections. Lenses. Lists. Facets. Free text search. IFP to IRI resolution. Find documents that contain IRIs etc... They are all implemented in different ways but tend to share semantics across different browsers and services. How far are we from defining a modular framework so we can mix and math these as atomic interaction pieces? Both services and probably UI parts. Of course, RDF and HTTP can be used to describe them and deliver the descriptions and, in the case of widgets, some OOTB implementations. XForms, Dojo widgets, SWFs? I have done something similar but much simpler in a Flex platform ( I serve Flex modules, described in RDF and referenced by Fresnel vocabs, but only for presentation ). And then on a functional side I have several services that do different things, and I can hot swap them. For example, the free text search service is a (S)WS. Faceter service idem. I guess we still need to see some more diversity to derive a taxonomy and start working on the framework. But it is nice to keep this in sight. The recurring topics. Best, A Aldo, Really nice to see you are looking at things holistically. As you can see, we are veering gradually towards recognizing that the Web, courtesy of HTTP, gives us a really interesting infrasructure for the time-tested MVC pattern (I've been trying to bring attention to this aspect of the Web for a while now). If you look at ODE (closely) you will notice it's an MVC vessel. We have components for Data Access (RDFiztion Cartridges), components for UI (xslt+css templates and fresnel+xslt+css templates), and components for actions (*Cartridges not released yet*). We've tried to focus on the foundation infrastructure that uses HTTP for the messaging across M-V-C so that you get: M--http-V---http---C Unfortunately, our focus on the MC doesn't permeate. Instead, we find all focus coming at us from the V part where we've released minimal templates with hope that 3rd parties will eventually focus on Display Cartridges (via Fresnel, XSLT+SPARQL, xml+xslt+css, etc..). btw - David Schwabe [1] also alluded to the architectural modularity that I am fundamentally trying to bring to broader attention in this evolving conversation re. Linked oriented Web applications. The ultimate goal is to deliver a set of options that enable Web Users to Explore the Web coherently and productively (imho). Humans can only do so much, and likewise Machines, put both together and we fashion a recipe for real collective intelligence (beyond the buzzword). We desperately need to tap into collective intelligenceen route to solving many of the real problems facing the world today. The Web should make seeing and connecting the dots easier, but this is down to the MVC combo as opposed to any single component of the pattern :-) Links: 1. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2008Aug/att-0106/00-part -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen President CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
ANN: Online Presence Ontology
Hi all, I would like to draw your attention to a new project that we have started at the Good Old AI (http://goodoldai.org.yu/) research group. The project addresses the issue of integrating and exchanging the data related to users' presence in the online world. The core part of the project is the Online Presence Ontology (OPO) that can be used to represent instant messaging statuses, status messages, avatars and other elements that form the image of a user's presence in the online world. As a difference from FOAF that models more static and persistent user profile data, our goal is to model the dynamic and frequently changing aspects of user profiles. All those dynamic aspects of online presence are currently published on different services (social networks, instant messaging platforms, Twitter-like and lifestreaming services) and the aim of OPO is to facilitate their exchange across those services. For more information on our current and future work please visit the OPO website (http://www.milanstankovic.org/opo/) and take a look at the Nodalities blog post related to OPO ( http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/08/opo-modelling-dynamic-online-presence.php ). All your comments, suggestions and ideas are welcome, as we are trying to further develop our ontology into a highly usable community-shaped vocabulary. Cheers Milan Stankovic
Little Correction: Modular Browsers (was RE: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data)
[snip] btw - David Schwabe [1] also alluded to the architectural modularity that I am fundamentally trying to bring to broader attention in this evolving conversation re. Linked oriented Web applications. Aldo, In my earlier post, excerpted above, I incorrectly referred to Daniel Schwabe as David Schwabe. This post is my s/David/Daniel style correction, for the record, on our sticky Web :-) The ultimate goal is to deliver a set of options that enable Web Users to Explore the Web coherently and productively (imho). Humans can only do so much, and likewise Machines, put both together and we fashion a recipe for real collective intelligence (beyond the buzzword). We desperately need to tap into collective intelligenceen route to solving many of the real problems facing the world today. The Web should make seeing and connecting the dots easier, but this is down to the MVC combo as opposed to any single component of the pattern :-) Links: 1. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2008Aug/att-0106/00-part -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen President CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Re: Modular Browsers (was RE: freebase parallax: user interface for browsing graphs of data)
Hello, ( replies inlined ) On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 9:19 PM, Kingsley Idehen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Aldo Bucchi wrote: HI, Scanning the thread on Parallax I see some terms reoccurring: Outgoing Connections. Lenses. Lists. Facets. Free text search. IFP to IRI resolution. Find documents that contain IRIs etc... They are all implemented in different ways but tend to share semantics across different browsers and services. How far are we from defining a modular framework so we can mix and math these as atomic interaction pieces? Both services and probably UI parts. Of course, RDF and HTTP can be used to describe them and deliver the descriptions and, in the case of widgets, some OOTB implementations. XForms, Dojo widgets, SWFs? I have done something similar but much simpler in a Flex platform ( I serve Flex modules, described in RDF and referenced by Fresnel vocabs, but only for presentation ). And then on a functional side I have several services that do different things, and I can hot swap them. For example, the free text search service is a (S)WS. Faceter service idem. I guess we still need to see some more diversity to derive a taxonomy and start working on the framework. But it is nice to keep this in sight. The recurring topics. Best, A Aldo, Really nice to see you are looking at things holistically. I showed up with a narrow interface, I know ;) As you can see, we are veering gradually towards recognizing that the Web, courtesy of HTTP, gives us a really interesting infrasructure for the time-tested MVC pattern (I've been trying to bring attention to this aspect of the Web for a while now). If you look at ODE (closely) you will notice it's an MVC vessel. We have components for Data Access (RDFiztion Cartridges), components for UI (xslt+css templates and fresnel+xslt+css templates), and components for actions (*Cartridges not released yet*). Ah... I remember telling Daniel Lewis something was missing from his UPnP diagram: a way to modify the Model. aka: a Controller / Actions. You are right, technically an agent like ODE ( assuming you can hook in actions ) is all that you need to allow users to interact with linked data. Let's say that this sort of solution can cover 80% of user interaction cases ( launching simple actions and direct manipulation of resources ), and operates on top of 80% of data ( anything that can be published as linked data/SPARQL and fits within the expressiveness of RDF's abstract model ). Not a bad MVC structure at all! So, how do you plan on hooking up the actions to the shell, is this in the cartridges? How will they surface. Context menu? We've tried to focus on the foundation infrastructure that uses HTTP for the messaging across M-V-C so that you get: M--http-V---http---C Unfortunately, our focus on the MC doesn't permeate. Instead, we find all focus coming at us from the V part where we've released minimal templates with hope that 3rd parties will eventually focus on Display Cartridges (via Fresnel, XSLT+SPARQL, xml+xslt+css, etc..). Well. The M part is the data, isn't it? ( so it is permeating, people are publishing data ). Unless you mean building some higher functionality services ( on top of SPARQL and RDF ) such as faceters, free text search, IFP resolution, etc. But in that case it is also moving forward, although not with a standardized interface. This could be thought of as higher level Data Access components. The C part... that's another story. As I pointed out before, you need to define the way and an environment to hook in the actions. What is the shell? For example, you could provide a JS API for ODE where developers could hook up methods using Adenine like signatures ( which, if I remember correctly, use rdf:type hinting ) and then surface them on the context menu. Or perhaps a server side registry of actions is more suitable. Many options here. I am curious about the Action Cartridges. Best solution overall should be agent independent ( and here we go down the SWS road once again ). btw - David Schwabe [1] also alluded to the architectural modularity that I am fundamentally trying to bring to broader attention in this evolving conversation re. Linked oriented Web applications. The ultimate goal is to deliver a set of options that enable Web Users to Explore the Web coherently and productively (imho). And that will eventually be ( dynamically ) assembled to deliver the functionality that today is present in walled garden applications. Humans can only do so much, and likewise Machines, put both together and we fashion a recipe for real collective intelligence (beyond the buzzword). We desperately need to tap into collective intelligenceen route to solving many of the real problems facing the world today. The Web should make seeing and connecting the dots easier, but this is down to the MVC combo as opposed to any single component of the pattern :-) Aha,
