Links on the Semantic Web
On the web of [x]HTML documents, the links are critical. Links are references to 'anchors' in other documents, and they use URIs which are formed by taking the URI of the document and adding a # sign and the local name of the anchor. This way, local anchors get a global name.
On the Semantic Web, links are also critical. Here, the local name, and the URI formed using the hash, refer to arbitrary things. When a semantic web document gives information about something, and uses a URI formed from the name of a different document, like foo.rdf#bar, then that's an invitation to look up the document, if you want more information about. I'd like people to use them more, and I think we need to develop algorithms which for deciding when to follow Semantic Web links as a function of what we are looking for.
To play with semantic web links, I made a toy semantic web browser, Tabulator. Toy, because it is hacked up in Javascript (a change from my usual Python) to experiment with these ideas. It is AJAR - Asynchronous Javascript and RDF. I started off with Jim Ley's RDF Parser and added a little data store. The store understands the mimimal OWL ([inverse] functional properties, sameAs) to smush nodes representing the same thing together, so it doesn't matter if people use many different URIs for the same thing, which of course they can. It has a simple index and supports simple query. The API is more or less the one which cwm and had been tending toward in python.
Then, with the DOM and CSS and Ecmascript standards bookmarked, the rest was just learning the difference between Javascript and Python. Fun, anyway.
The result .. insert a million disclaimers... experimental, work in progress, only runs on Firefox for no serious reason, not accessible, too slow, etc ... at least is a platform for looking at Semantic Web data in a fairly normal way, but also following links. A blue dot indicates something which could be downloaded. Download some data before exploring the data in it. Note that as you download multiple FOAF files for example the data from them merges into the unified view. (You may have to collapse and re-expand an outline).
Here is the current snag, though. Firefox security does not allow a script from a given domain to access data from any other domain, unless the scripts are signed, or made into an extension. And looking for script signing tools (for OS X?) led me to dead ends. So if anyone knows how to do that, let me know. Untill I find a fix for that, the power of following links -- which is that they can potentially go anywhere -- is alas not evident!
