Samuel's Tech Blog

This week I just finished the last remaining items on my todo list for my Google Summer of Code project, (which is available in the form of the RDFIO MediaWiki extension). Those things, which I also mentioned in my last blog post were to:

• Add ability to use ("pseudo") namespaces for general RDF entities (non-properties) in order to choose wiki titles for them on RDF import.
• Add a screen that shows URIs lacking a namespace prefix to abbreviate it with.

Regarding the first point, it might not be overly easy to see the usefulness of it at once, so I just created a screencast to show the difference between using it and not:

• Link to youtube video page

It demonstrates the problem of choosing sensible wiki titles for general RDF entities in case no good property for naming is available, (such as rdfs:label etc) ... since "entity" URIs often just consist of nonsensible id:s and often no namespace prefixes are defined for them. RDFIO lets you add "pseudo" namespaces (using a simplified splitting pattern, not necessarily consistent with XMLns specs), in order to come around this problem.

• The new functionality is so far only available in the svn trunk
• More info, install instructions etc on the extension page

Hopefully I'll find time to also demonstrate the second point above, as well as the "filter by ontology" feature for the SPARQL endpoint, with screencasts early next week.

Otherwise, the coming week I'll use for doing some refactoring of the currently quite unmanageable code, as well as add commenting, and hopefully also add the feature to filter RDF export by a [[Export RDF::false]] SMW property (which was the "it time permits" item of my TODO list).