Exhibit-ionism

by Bijan Parsia

Exhibit really is charming. I did an experimental Exhibit of my publications, as listed on DBLP. I hacked up a little XSLT to scrape my DBLP pages for Bibtex (which is available; it’s like 14 xslt lines which is like 2 lines for you and me). Details are on the Exhibit itself.

It’s wasn’t bad at all, and the results are great. The original CSS layout was a little “roomy” for my taste, but that’s easy enough to tweak. It’s not accessible, at all. I think that will be easy to fix but the default should be a little less “live”. (It’s a bit tricky, because that will mix in the data a tiny bit, so if you update your data you have to update the page too; but c’mon!)

If FOAF data gave me a default home page as sexy as this, I’d probably have a FOAF file.

I do wish that all this lovely stuff wasn’t based on Javascript. I don’t know if Exhibit per se would be possible in a declarative, sub-Turing complete format (or reasonable, at least), but all the “show more/show less” toggley stuff is. Maybe the new HTML working group will save the day (ok, that’s snark for another day).

(Re puerility: DabbleDB is definitely easier to use. But, unless your data is in the Commons, you have to be signed in to the right degree to share, or you share a static document. Exhibit requires “normal web development” tools: XSLT, text editors, etc. etc., so you are a little removed from the data. But the results are free standing, which is just glorious. There’s no reason, of course, that you can’t have both.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Dealing with Data. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 4 Comments

florent 03/15/2007 03:14 PM 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Hi,
Instead of using XSLT, you could also use directly the RDF access to DBLP : http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/
Normally a Sparql query can give you all the needed data.
Did you try this way ?

reply edit reblog flag

Bijan Parsia 03/15/2007 03:30 PM 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

I didn't know about that site. It looks handy.

I might try the experiment of extracting stuff via this RDFization. Though, the XSLT is pretty trivial and has done the job.

reply edit reblog flag

Dave Brondsema 03/15/2007 10:41 PM 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Fresnel (http://www.w3.org/2005/04/fresnel-info/) is a declarative format for how RDF should be presented. None of the interactive features that Exhibit gives you, would be possible. Maybe. But it could be a nice way to have a RDF-driven homepage.

reply edit reblog flag

http://brondsema.net/

Bijan Parsia 03/16/2007 08:51 AM 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

I'm aware of Fresnel (and, indeed, we use it in JSpace.

My point is completely distinct from RDF. My point is that there is a lot of Javascript + CSS out there that make many sites way more usable (for certainly classes of users, including me!), but I wish more of these interactive features were available without having to use an idiosyncratic implementation of them in a full fledged, but inconsistently implemented, programming language.

Javascript programmers have done amazing things (just see OAT), but I like web pages to be safer than they are and still usable. Some things are easy to roll in (toggling visibility of text...that should be built in; footnotes; lots of widgets). They would be easier to use as well (though the best Javascript libraries do a pretty good job of making widgets plug and go).

Finally, none of the Fresnel implementations have one of the most charming features of Exhibit: working in standalone pages. It's obviously not impossible to make one up, but doing it straight from RDF would probably be pretty painful. Something Fresnelish tuned for Exhibit databases would certainly be easier to get going, I'd imagine.

reply edit reblog flag

Trackbacks

(Trackback URL)

Thinking Clearly .

Exhibit-ionism

Add New Comment

Viewing 4 Comments

Add New Comment

Trackbacks