Thinking Clearly .

It’s often not clear how or whether anyone who doesn’t fetishize “the Web” (is “HTTP Fetishist” more accurate?) can demonstrate to a Web Fetishist her or his good faith with regard to the Web. That gets annoying, frankly.

While we aren’t fetishists of that sort, we build our systems and technology to work with, use, make advantage of, and otherwise co-exist with “the Web” when and where that makes sense, which is very often. As more evidence of that fact, consider OwlSight, which is an OWL ontology browser that runs on Web browsers, delivering a realistic and useful “rich Internet application for the Semantic Web”—enough buzz words there?

OwlSight is a GWT-Ext application, which is turning into a pretty damn good development platform for us.

Further, we’ve recently been working on GRDDL support in OwlSight; where by “we” I mean “Mike Grove,” and by “recently” I mean “during the OWLWG meetings” this week last week.

By “GRDDL support in OwlSight,” I mean that we’ve defined a trivially simple RDF vocabulary that describes collections of OWL ontologies—that is, ontology repositories—published on the Web. We use the RDFa GRDDL transform to extract this RDF from Web pages, and then OwlSight builds a user interface for browsing these OWL ontology collections on-the-fly, both as a collection and as individual ontologies.

At some point we may do the slightly harder thing: visualizing ontology repositories, both according to how they relate to each other by way of, say, owl:imports, as well as how they are structured according to something like our locality-based ontology modularization stuff. (By which I mean: we have code that is able to tear OWL DL ontologies apart, in a logic and semantics-respecting way, in very reasonable running time. If you do anything at all seriously with ontologies, you’ll know how useful this is…)

So what does all this mean?

It means that OwlSight with GRDDL is very Web-friendly: anyone on the Web can publish an OWL ontology repository on the Web, embed some information about that repository into a Web page using RDFa (or any other GRDDL transform, for that matter); and then point OwlSight at that repository and get some joy.

Even I—no Web fetishist at all—find that quite nice. Sometimes Linked Data means Linked Ontologies. Wouldn’t it be nice if the OWL DL Haters would keep that in mind?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 3:10 pm and is filed under OWL, SemWeb. 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.