Comments on: DabbleDB vs. Exhibit

By: keithalexander

keithalexander — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 14:53:02 +0000

I’m not absolutely sure, but Exhibit’s structuring of items as records looks to be ‘aped’ too – that is, if you supply two items with the same id, Exhibit will ‘smoosh’ them together. (Is that what you meant by ‘real structure’?)

As for pulling in live RDF data to an Exhibit, you might be interested in a simple script I wrote to bridge generically between Exhibit and a SPARQL endpoint – it takes a template exhibit json file as input, and outputs an exhibit json file full of data.

(See http://semwebdev.keithalexander.co.uk/blog/posts/Exhibit-JSON.html )

By: keithalexander

keithalexander — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:53:02 +0000

(See http://semwebdev.keithalexander.co.uk/blog/post…; )

By: keithalexander

keithalexander — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:53:02 +0000

(See http://semwebdev.keithalexander.co.uk/blog/post…; )

By: Bijan Parsia

Bijan Parsia — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 13:37:33 +0000

dfhuynh, DabbleDB seems to be (still) in rapid change mode, so no worries.

I was able to take the tab delimited output of Exhibit and pop it into DabbleDB with ease. Yay. Tab delim rocks! (though the typing is a bit weird…value typing so one could more easily pass, e.g., dates around would be nice)

I don’t know how illuminating that survey would be. I only recently updated my web page (really set up my web page) at Manchester. My CV is perennially out of date. I hate it when, e.g., ISWC forces me to drum up some metadata for a paper I submit. Hate it!

Yet, I would like high quality Bibtex for every paper I find. Citeseer’s is icky (but I use it!) DBLP is nicer (but has some usability issues…those cite keys).

There are lots of little barriers to doing stuff.

OTOH, I now intend to use Exhibit for my pubs (and other aspects of my home page). I was planning to do something neat with Javascript and the HTML, but why build from scratch?

By: Bijan Parsia

Bijan Parsia — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:37:33 +0000

dfhuynh, DabbleDB seems to be (still) in rapid change mode, so no worries.

I was able to take the tab delimited output of Exhibit and pop it into DabbleDB with ease. Yay. Tab delim rocks! (though the typing is a bit weird...value typing so one could more easily pass, e.g., dates around would be nice)

I don't know how illuminating that survey would be. I only recently updated my web page (really set up my web page) at Manchester. My CV is perennially out of date. I hate it when, e.g., ISWC forces me to drum up some metadata for a paper I submit. Hate it!

Yet, I would like high quality Bibtex for every paper I find. Citeseer's is icky (but I use it!) DBLP is nicer (but has some usability issues...those cite keys).

There are lots of little barriers to doing stuff.

OTOH, I now intend to use Exhibit for my pubs (and other aspects of my home page). I was planning to do something neat with Javascript and the HTML, but why build from scratch?

By: Bijan Parsia

Bijan Parsia — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:37:33 +0000

By: dfhuynh

dfhuynh — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:28:01 +0000

Bijan, thanks for pointing out DabbleDB’s plugin architecture. I guess I wasn’t as familiar with it as I thought.

It would be illuminating to do a survey on web sites of SemWeb researchers and see how many actually use RDF in the back-end or in the front-end. As you might have noticed from the paper, 7 out of 140 database researchers use databases for their publication web pages :-) So, I totally agree with you about the pains of RDF.

By: Bijan Parsia

Bijan Parsia — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 09:34:01 +0000

Thanks for the comments. I updated the main post with a correction about RDF/XML export.

David, you can extend DabbleDB in a variety of ways (and, really, do you need the translators built in, per se?). In particular, you can create a plugin hosted on your site that DabbleDB will call out to. This is definitely weirder and less flexible than Exhibit, but also seems pretty workable for a class of extensions.

By: dfhuynh

dfhuynh — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:28:01 +0000

Bijan, thanks for pointing out DabbleDB’s plugin architecture. I guess I wasn’t as familiar with it as I thought.

By: dfhuynh

dfhuynh — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:28:01 +0000

Bijan, thanks for pointing out DabbleDB’s plugin architecture. I guess I wasn’t as familiar with it as I thought.

By: Bijan Parsia

Bijan Parsia — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:34:01 +0000

Thanks for the comments. I updated the main post with a correction about RDF/XML export.

David, you can extend DabbleDB in a variety of ways (and, really, do you need the translators built in, per se?). In particular, you can create a plugin hosted on your site that DabbleDB will call out to. This is definitely weirder and less flexible than Exhibit, but also seems pretty workable for a class of extensions.

By: Bijan Parsia

Bijan Parsia — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:34:01 +0000

By: dfhuynh

dfhuynh — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:21:35 +0000

Bijan, Exhibit does export to a variety of formats, including RDF/XML, N3, Semantic MediaWiki wikitext, JSON, and even Bibtex. The Copy All button lets you pick your format to export. And this is extensible by any person who uses Exhibit. (Good luck if you want to extend DabbleDB.)

A complimentary service called Babel lets you convert between various formats:
http://simile.mit.edu/babel/
In addition, you can hook Exhibit directly to Google Spreadsheets (and in the future, EditGrid):
http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit/How_to_make_an_exhibit_from_data_fed_directly_from_a_Google_Spreadsheet

By: Danny

Danny — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:03:43 +0000

Exhibit does claim to be RDFish – from the paper:
[[
The Exhibit abstract data model is essentially the RDF [7] abstract data model except that property values cannot be assigned value types individually. In this way, the Exhibit data model is a sub-model of the RDF data model, less powerful but sufficient for many simple use cases.
]]
I had to be shown this myself, but if you go to e.g. the Presidents demo, and click “Copy All”, there’s the option of RDF/XML.

What kind of applications have you got in mind for either, in which a syntax mapping to/from RDF wouldn’t suffice?

(Smalltalk, woohoo++)

By: drewp

drewp — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:02:43 +0000

Thanks for writing this up. I’m a fan and user of exhibit, and just a fan of dabbledb.

I’d like to mention that exhibit has a trivial rdf export, which I’ve never used. Click ‘Copy All’ at the top, pick rdf, and you’ll get some generic RDF/XML where the property names seem to be fragments off the url of the exhibit’s page. That might be decent, but it’s obviously not flexible enough for fancier applications (e.g. where the property names came from multiple RDF sources).

For import, simile also has http://simile.mit.edu/babel/ which I have not checked out yet. It claims to convert RDF/XML to JSON for exhibit. I’m also not sure if you can build the babel call into your exhibit page, which would make it look like the exhibit was pulling live RDF on startup.