SIOC/SiocRdfBrowser

About

The SIOC RDF browser is an on-the-fly or live browser, which offers a simple and effective way to explore community information available in SIOC. It gives a user-friendly look at the internal structure of the data without requiring the viewers to dive into a more complex RDF/XML syntax.

The on-the-fly SIOC browser takes a URL of a SIOC data source, e.g., from a SIOC plugin to the blog engine, and presents viewers with a web page showing a hierarchy of the concepts and links contained within it. For a blog post, this information would include all that is important to know: title, author, date, content, topic categories and tags, and information about replies (comments and trackbacks) to that post.

Some of the links in SIOC data, called rdfs:seeAlso links, point to additional machine readable information (in RDF and SIOC). A browser can follow these links and display this SIOC information in the same user-friendly way.

An sample post as seen in the SIOC browser is shown in Figure 4.

To Do List

Ideas:

* if >1 property links to the same resource, display those property names together, e.g. joined by "|".
* could take namespace(s) from the RDF/XML instead (but won't work for non-XML RDF serialisations)
* please add a few good representative example URIs to the frontpage to make it easier to test the browser for first time visitors.

Improvements:

* filter out list of restricted IP addresses
** may check who is requesting the info (source IP address)
* fix UTF-8 bug in http://sparql.captsolo.net/browser/browser.py?url=http%3A//weltweit24m%E4rz.de/doap.rdf
* why is there this message when W3C validator says it is valid?! - see http://sparql.captsolo.net/browser/browser.py?url=http%3A//www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/%7Eauer/foaf.rdf
* add new namespaces to SIOC Browser as well (doap, dc, dcterms, ...) - can take namespaces from the RDF file
* improve the look of http://rdfs.org/blog/index.php?sioc_type=comment&sioc_id=2 in SIOC browser
* Allow browsing of pages other than SIOC profiles
* Put seeAlso links at the same place than the original posts URL
* Show creator infos instead of blank node, eg: http://sparql.captsolo.net/browser/browser.py?url=http%253A%252F%252Fjohnbreslin.com%252Fblog%252Findex.php%253Fsioc_type%253Dcomment%2526sioc_id%253D89559
* link the browser page from rdfs.org menu: http://rdfs.org/sioc/browser/
* improve CSS stylesheet
* fix error-handling when retrieving URLs
* improve the speed of SIOC browser
  * caching (with an option to disable caching)
  * mod_python or FastCGI
* move 'Validate RDF' to a page footer
* report errors in RSS feed / log file / database

ToDo:

* improve the look of error message pages (structured HTML + CSS)
* add "important announcements" line to SIOC browser

Bugs:

* remove ':' from the property name in case if the namespace was not count in the ns_list 
* fix error-handling when retrieving URLs

For next release

* do content negotiation (send accept headers)
* add handling of HTML pages 
  * add control flow for case when there is HTML page, not RDF data
  * show auto-discovered RDF/XML links
  * show extracted RDFa links
  * offer option to visit the page

Done

* Fix encoding problem in Uldis python browser
* Fixed problem when parameter missing
* Output default screen / URL input form (when URL parameter not supplied)
* Add CSS
* add control flow for case when there is invalid RDF/XML