Languages and modeling

Semantic Desktop Rich Client

Projects like Haystack, DBin, Gnowsis, Fenfire, OpenIris, etc work on creating a user interface for the semantic desktop. They all face the same problem of integrating applications, good user interaction design, easy installation, updates, providing a plugin architecture, etc. To have a common point for collaboration, we envision an open-source platform to create user interfaces on the semantic desktop, which provides:

• a RDF API to manipulate RDF
• basic data components to display RDF: lists, tables, trees, text-edits, checkboxes, ...
• plugins that provide a user interface for a certain domain: a plugin for geo-tagging resources, a plugin to display resources in a timeline, a plugin to edit properties of foaf:Persons, ...
• an architecture that allows plugins
• user interfaces that are generated based on schema and styling languages like fresnel or adenine

To achieve this, we would propose to combine these projects together:

• Haystack
• DBin
• Gnowsis

The basis for this rich client can be the Eclipse rich client platform, that is already used by Haystack and DBin.

Participants

At the moment, the following people have shown general interest in this topic and want to be involved in further actions:

• Stephane Lauriere
• Leo Sauermann
• Giovanni Tummarello
• Christian Morbidoni?
• Jack Park
• Bernhard Schandl
• Laurent Joly?

Contact person: Stephane Lauriere

add your name to this list if you want, anyone who can contribute, can join

Next Action:

Leo Sauermann: I would start this work in February 2007, with the architecture and agreements.

next, we would propose to meet together for a longer period (three months?) to design the semantic desktop rich client platform together, and start implementing a reference implementation. Once this is done, we setup a normal open-source project and work using mailinglists, forums, bugtracker, etc.

Related projects

IBM is about to release a set of tools to crete rich client applications named SLRP - Semantic Layered Research Platform.

SLRP on sourceforge