RDF as first class citizen

[bmarchal]

I enjoy the new support for JSON in oXygen 13 but there is another technology that I see growing, it's RDF.
There are RDF-specific products, such as Protégé, but I'm used to work with oXygen and I'd like to see it built up it's RDF support. In concrete terms, it would mean:
- assistance in the editor
- graphical editing of RDFS and OWL
In longer terms, support for SPARQL and other similar tools would be good.

[Radu]

Hi,

Thanks for the request, I logged it to our internal issues list.
Based on user feedback maybe in a year or two we'll add at least some minimal RDF content assistance support.

Regards,
Radu

[Lonerider]

Hello,
here I would like to support bmarchal's request completely.
Radu's gave his statement 4 years ago.
Now that I'm starting to prepare a semantic web solution,
I need a development environment that supports rdf/rdfa, json-ld, owl and sparql,
not only in text form, but also graphically.
As I could use Eclipse and oXygen for all other XML development and similar,
I would really appreciate to see that oXygen supports all data mentioned above as well.

By the way, several web pages tell that oXygen supports RDF (see http://extension.nirsoft.net/rdf),
but I cannot verify that.

Please help us to develop semantic web solutions.

Best regards

[adrian]

Hi,

I've added your vote.
Radu proposed to implement some minimal support for RDF content assistance. It was discussed and decided that this minimal support would not be sufficient for Oxygen to claim "RDF support". Properly supporting RDF is not a trivial task, so this will take some time.
You can probably achieve minimal support right now (generic XML content completion and validation), if you setup a simple custom Oxygen framework (detection and schema) for RDF.

Regards,
Adrian

[Lonerider]

Hi,

ok, I will do that. Could you please provide a short task list, which shows how to setup a simple custom oXygen framework in the most efficient way?

Thanks in advance and best regards

[adrian]

Hi,

This describes Document Types (Frameworks) in general and what they can offer.
And this is an Advanced Customization Tutorial - Document Type Associations that describes how to create and tweak custom document types.
If you're not interested in visual editing you can skip the sections mentioning the Author mode or CSS customizations.
What you need for generic support is "Basic Association", "XML Catalogs" and maybe Validation and Transformation Scenarios.

Regards,
Adrian

[bmarchal]

Adrian what you are proposing there is… weak support. As you indicated yourself in the analysis made by Radu.
I hope you won't be offended if I suggest to lone rider that he looks into products like Protege

[Lonerider]

@bmarchal: thanks for your hint.

@adrian: Could you please show up a roadmap for oXygen's development toward an RDF support.
So I would be interested (and bmarchal probably, too) what "so this will take some time." in your statement means in months, years,...

Regards

[Radu]

Hi,

We do not know much about RDF and we do not use it internally in any way.
Ideally if you have the time you could write an email and explain in greater detail, with samples, the RDF-related improvements you would like to see in Oxygen.
I created on my side a simple framework for editing and validating RDF in Oxygen but from what I see RDF can be combined with other vocabularies (like OWL) and I am not sure what this implies in terms of validation and helping the end user edit those values directly.
Also, are RDF files usually generated by automatic processes and end users only peek into them and occasionally change content or are they created and edited manually by end users?
I somehow need to understand how this entire ecosystem works, what it tries to solve and so on.

Regards,
Radu

[bmarchal]

Essentially RDF proposes a different data model than XML: everything is encoded as a triplet. The XML serialization is, in many ways, secondary. On this data model, you can create data structures. OWL is one of them.

A couple of years ago, I put together a very high-level introduction at:

http://fr.slideshare.net/bmarchal/rdf-i ... ide-braint

One of the benefits of triplets is that it is possible to merge datasets more efficiently, integrating data from many different sources.

I would imagine that OxygenXML would need a triplet editor as a first step. The editor would have facilities to serialize/deserialize XML (and ideally other) representations. It would also manage the ontologies behind the triplets with code completion, etc.

--ben

[Radu]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the link to the presentation, I looked at it.

We had an internal discussion and for the short and medium term (next years) we do not plan on having very powerful RDF support.
We'll offer some limited support to open and validate an RDF file with the XML syntax but that will probably be it.

Regards,
Radu

[bmarchal]

Thanks for taking the time to look into this issue and to come back with a clear answer.

--ben