Semantic Radar is a "semantic metadata detector" for Firefox and is a product of a wider research project based at DERI, National University of Ireland. Semantic Radar can identify the presence of FOAF, DOAP and SIOC data in a webpage (as well as more generic RDF and RDFa data) and will display the relevant icon(s) in the Firefox status bar to alert the user when such data is found. (See screen shot for FOAF example) Clicking the icon(s) enables users to browse the data using an online semantic browser (e.g. FOAF Explorer, SIOC Browser). In short, Semantic Radar parses web pages for RDF auto-discovery links to discover semantic data. A neat tool to have...
Semantic Radar has been available for sometime, but a recent update to the widget means that it is now possible to automatically 'ping' the Ping The Semantic Web website. Ping The Semantic Web (PTSW) is an online service harvesting, storing and distributing RDF documents. If one of those documents is updated, its author can notify PTSW to that effect by pinging it with the URL of the document. This is an amazingly efficient way to disseminate semantic data. It is also an amazingly effective way for crawlers and other software agents to discover and index RDF data on the web. (URLs indexed by PTSW can be re-used by other web services and can also be viewed on the PTSW website (See screenshot of PTSW for my FOAF file)).
It might just be me, but I’m finally getting the sense that the volume of structured data available on the web - and the tools necessary to harness it - are beginning to reach some sort of critical mass. The recent spate of blogs echoing this topic bare testament to that (e.g. [1], [2]). Dare I use such a term, but Web 3.0 definitely feels closer than ever.
George I have recently picked up on Firebug. A very neat little tool. I'm using it to look at CSS based web sites and what is going on with them. However it is IE that tends to be the problem with these.
ReplyDeleteOne interesting thing it throws up is how long a page load takes. One of the sites one of my people looks after the main elapsed time of rendering a page is Google Analytics.
Having said this I was mostly looking at it in detail to see if it could be used alongside Javascript as a lightweight development environment to teach kids programming. Now that there are no BBC computers I worry that people are becoming IT users rather than understanding what makes the magic screens light up.
Where once schools taught BASIC programming and had turtles and logo running around now it all seems to be how to put your heading in Bold. A good lightweight interpreted environment that kids can do things with might help.
It was actually Chris Taylor that turned me onto Firebug - but what a neat tool! The Google Analytics comment is interesting indeed.
ReplyDeleteSome less useful tools, but cool nevertheless, include Viamatic foXpose. When you have 15 tabs open, it can be a useful navigation aid! Francis gave me a demonstration of PicLens earlier in the week. A bit resource intensive, but pretty nifty.