SIOC/SemanticRadar

About

Semantic Radar is a semantic metadata detector for Mozilla Firefox. It detects the presence of SIOC, FOAF and DOAP as well as generic RDF and RDFa data in a webpage, and displays icons in the browser's status bar when one of these data formats is found. By clicking on an icon the user can browse the RDF data in an online semantic browser. It looks for RDF auto-discovery links generated by data export plugins to discover semantic data.

The radar application can ping the Ping The Semantic Web website, an online service that collects, stores and distributes links to RDF documents for every ping, and this is an efficient way to find and index SIOC data over the Web. URLs indexed by the ping service can be re-used by other web services and can also be viewed on its website. SIOC-enabled websites can also be registered on the SIOC community wiki and this wiki page can then be used by Semantic Web tools as a starting point for crawling and exploration.

Installation

Get Semantic Radar from Mozilla Add-ons

ToDo List

future ideas

• used Mozmill for unit/system testing: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozmill_Tests/Tutorial:_Introduction_to_Mozmill

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Web-sites:

• create a small SemRadar logo/ad
• a simple webpage telling what it is, demo, explanation, images.

Improvements (wanted):

• ping a custom service
• open an application when an icon / url is clicked (Tuukka)
• detect N3 serialisation:
  • question - what mime-types indicate N3? -- text/rdf+n3, application/rdf+n3, application/n3, application/turtle, application/x-turtle, application/n-triples, ...
• add pop-up list with choices what to do with data
  • validate RDF
  • show SIOC browser
• Would it send a URI that the client has been authorised to view?

Not sure if we should do this:

• Creative Commons license detector
• detect RDF trackbacks, ...

for 0.96

• fix the options dialogue
• add tooltip for indicating pinging status
• * see http://groups.google.com/group/sioc-dev/browse_thread/thread/fdeb854ded398dac

for 1.0

• a custom ping service to send pings to
• make it compatible and test with Firefox 3

• add tabbing of options
• fix the multiple pings bug

• more flexible list of choices what to do with RDF
  • perhaps a popup window after a user has chosen a URL
  • launch application with the url supplied (?)
  • this can be an "Expert mode" option
• add "Expert mode" for settings for advanced users
• when installing Semantic Radar display a dialog with choice if to enable or disable pings
• can try to request the URL with RDF content negotiation (and add RDF URL / link to the list of discovered URLs)

Unsure about these

• check if the URLs found actually exist or return errors
• move the options menu to the end (as was before)
• detect RDF links in the body (regexp?)

Done

• possibility to ping a semweb-ping-service
• add auto-detection of plugin updates - described in Enabling Extension Updates
• send pings about all application/rdf+xml files detected
• blacklist of URLs not to send pings about

for 0.95

Improvements:

• have choice of how to display RDF:
  • raw RDF, SIOC browser, custom url
• put back the Options menu
• detection of RDFa
• display icon for all types of RDF
  • display a list of multiple URLs per icon/type (if more than one RDF URL is present)

Bugs

• we don't capture the event when the user goes back in the browser, so we don't display icons in that cases.
• fires detection/pinging every time the tab gets focus
  • ping only on URL open, not a tab change