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Welkin: A General-Purpose RDF Browser

Posted by timothy on from the what-am-I-thinking-about dept.

Stefano Mazzocchi writes "Many consider the Semantic Web to be vaporware and others believe it's the next big thing. No matter where you stand, a question always pops up: Where is the RDF browser? The SIMILE Project, a joint project between W3C, MIT and HP to implement semantic interoperability of metadata in digital libraries, released today the first beta release of a general purpose graphic and interactive RDF browser named Welkin (see a screenshot), targetted to those who need to get a mental model of any RDF dataset, from a single RSS 1.0 news feed to a collection of digital data."

2 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Gee thanks... by kfg · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    . . .relate their own ontologies out of English text. . .

    Which would be perfectly dandy, if we were storing data for computers to use for their own purposes.

    So long as we are storing data for interpretation by human minds we circle back to your own arguments for why the semantic web is silly.

    Some developers get so wrapped in the AI that they entirely neglect that their own I is part of the system.

    KFG

  2. Re:Gee thanks... by kfg · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I thought XML was supposed to do that?

    No, all XML was supposed to do is add semantics to the web. The idea that it could be used to merge databases was a later addition by people who really don't seem to understand the concepts.

    To merge databases all you really need is a previously agreed upon semantics. Since there is an "X" in XML those semantics are not inherent in XML itself and must be included with the data.

    The thing is, that if one includes the semantics with the data (or simply agrees on it ahead of time) the inclusion of tags is completely unneccessary and thus verbosely redundant.

    "Yo, dude. First field is going to be name. Second field address. Third field phone number."

    name, address, phone number

    As opposed to:

    "Yo, dude. The name tag is going to be name. The address tag is going to be address. The phone number tag is going to be phone number."

    [name]name[/name]
    [address]address[/address]
    [ phone number]phone number[/phone number]

    It's all very silly and smacks of making things complicated because you think complicated must be more advanced than simple somehow.

    KFG