RE: [Gzz] RE: [ba-ohs-talk] Fenfire, RDF (re "Towards a Standard Graph-Based...")
> Cool. I have had a short look at your blog before, but need to
> look deeper. (01)
Eurgh, can't look very deep at the moment, the archive templates are pretty
screwed up. They have been for a while, but I've been planning to transfer
over to Movable Type, it's easier to hack. Still googleable using site:
http://etc (02)
> What do you think about having a mailing list where these get posted &
> we can discuss them? I think that would be valuable for me. If there is
> interest, I can set a publically logged one up under the Fenfire project
> at savannah.nongnu.org. (03)
Sure, that'd be good. Also when I get the blog moved over to MT it'll easy
to allow other people to blog to it. (04)
> Whoops, another thing I didn't know about. TM? (05)
Topic Maps (also notice the difference between model & syntax - XTM's the
usual, but Jack & others have discussed expressing them in RDF - layer on
layer on layer...) (06)
> To give you a rough overview, there's a short-term and a long-term
> subproject, called Fenfire Loom and Buoyoing.
>
> Loom is our RDF editor, based on lessons learned from zzstructure
> editor. It uses focus-and-context views: You see a 'focused' node in the
> middle of a window, and around it, the nodes it's connected to. (07)
Sounds cool - kinda like
http://www.ideagraph.net/unleashed/#Squirrel ? (08)
It will
> be usable indepent from the rest of Fenfire. I hope to release a 0.1,
> which only supports browsing and no editing yet, next week. (09)
What programming language(s) are you using? (010)
> Buoyoing ("Buoy-oriented interface, next generation") is our scheme for
> integrating data from different applications. This, too, is a
> focus+context interface. In the middle of a window, you see e.g. an
> html-like document. In the margins, you see pieces of other documents
> that are linked to this document, *buoys*, and there are lines
> connecting the buoys to the piece of the main document they're linked
> to. When you click on a buoy it becomes the focus (animated), and the
> formerly focused document moves into the margin, becoming a buoy. (011)
That does sound very nice. (012)
> > Why do you need the same byte sequence?
>
> Um, in short: We identify versions of graphs by cryptographic hashes,
> and to get the hash of a version, we need to serialize it in a canonical
> way. (013)
Hmm, I'm sure you have good reason to use something other than URIs for
identification... (014)
> Re Ideagraph, btw: You asked me for comments earlier following our urn-5
> discussion (I wasn't able to reply due to time constraints). The thing
> that really stood out was that I'd recommend a layer of indirection in
> the RDF vocabulary. Instead of this::
>
> node rdf:label "Foo"
> node graphics:x "17"
> node graphics:y "44"
> node graphics:width "50"
> node graphics:height "20"
>
> I would do this::
>
> canvas foo:containsNode ref
> ref graphics:x "17"
> ref graphics:y "44"
> ref graphics:width "50"
> ref graphics:height "20"
> ref foo:refersTo node
> node rdf:label "Foo"
>
> This way, the same node (e.g. person, blog item, ...) can be placed in
> multiple spatial locations on multiple canvases. This is something I
> learned from Ted Nelson: One thing should always be able to be in
> multiple contexts. For example, this way you can experiment with
> different spatial arrangements and store the alternatives. Or you can
> arrange the same nodes in different ways to make different points. (015)
Very good point (& thanks for the suggestion), though I'm not sure I'd
approach it in this way - I don't think the indirection is needed. There's
nothing in the RDF model stopping the coexistence of (016)
nodeA graphics:x "17"
nodeA graphics:x "18" (017)
even if nodeA is a URI (018)
so some kind of contextualization is needed anyway. So the lines along which
I was thinking were more like : (019)
canvasX{
nodeA graphics:x "17"
} (020)
canvasY{
nodeA graphics:x "18"
} (021)
Though I've not worked much of this out yet - looking at a containership
vocab. Anyhow, I'm still tinkering with much cruder stuff at present though,
plenty of time to think about this... (022)
Cheers,
Danny. (023)