Graphic for your application or site

Working on the Semantic Links wiki site (http://www.semanticlinks.net/wiki) I faced a problem of high-quality free graphic resources (icons/buttons). So I found several good sites that provides such resources. First of all thanks a lot to Nikolai Bird (http://www.webdesign-guru.co.uk/icon/) for his Web 2.0 graphics (http://www.webdesign-guru.co.uk/icon/web-20-graphics/) and collection of free icons links (http://www.webdesign-guru.co.uk/icon/free-icons-graphics-links/) And of course I found IconLet search engine (http://www.iconlet.com/) useful. It provides search for icons having the following search parameters:

• name
• format (gif,png)
• resolution
• license (free, GPL, Creative Commons, etc ...)

Just one disadvantage - it's impossible to specify several resolutions (or range). Well and last - Icons on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Icons).

Semantic Links Wiki

Now the wiki site is created to accumulate the information about the Semantic Links and about the Semantic Web. You can find it here: http://www.semanticlinks.net/wiki.

One year in Live

The Semantic Links project is one year in live. Now It supports the FireFox. Thanks to Firebugs! Also I implemented a possibility to inject the Semantic Links functionality to any site. I'm still working on the Class Designer and new widgetes. Let me know if you'd like to attend the project!

Furebug - great web development tool

This is an excellent add-on for the FireFox. The Furebug lets debug front-end stuff with pleasure because it provides such cool features as:

• JavaScript debugger
• Nice watch panel that shows all about JavaScript objects, functions, variables
• DOM Viewer
• CSS Viewer
• Dynamic HTML Viewer that can higliht elements on the FF when your mouse is over HTML tag
• Inspector - to select any object on the rendered page and show it's HTML
• Console
• Editor
• Features to speed up your code

Very useful tutorial is here. Also you can find some videos about Firebug.

To Open or not to Open?

Well, I'm thinking about make the Semantic Web project an open source. It seems that it can push the project.

Yahoo! Proposed they mashup builder. The main feature that you can design your mashup with graphical designer and use some predefined operators and modules.

The mashup is a pipe in Yahoo! terms. So you can create your pipe with use:

• Inputs from Yahoo Search, Fetch, Google Base, Flickr.
• User inputs: numbers, strings, URL, location, …
• Operators – they help to process data: create loops, counters, filters and other.
• Other modules and operators.

Very interesting is that you can reuse other pipe in your own pipe.

Mostly pipes are suitable to analyze RSS feeds. This is because Yahoo provides several cool modules that work with feed. For example I created a pipe that do the following:

1. Gets user input (search text)
2. fetch feeds from:
1. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/semantic
2. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/semanticweb
3. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/rdf
3. search for “search text” in every entry of feeds

The picture with this simple pipe is shown below.

Pipes can be useful to search what you need across feeds with similar semantic. Especially if you search every day.

It’s not so tricky to create your own pipe. Also I’m sure that number of allowed modules will grow and more complex pipes will be possible just as 1-2-3.

Start from example pipes to understand how they work http://pipes.yahoo.com/tags/example/

On January 16, Geni launched. It allows people to create quick and beautiful family trees.

That’s really simple but valuable idea. A kind of social network built on the sibling connection. Just imagine that next step of the Web 2.0 is to interconnect different social networks. In this case we’ll have “real digital persons” with a lot of connections of different types. This will be a many-dimensional web.

Demo of the new WEB ;)

Well, now I pushed portion of Semantic Links directly to my blog (see SemanticLinks Demo section). What’s this? This is a catalog of innovations directly on my blog. And lots of other ideas can be implemented in the same manner ;). I’d like to tell how it works. Earlier I decided to create the catalog of innovations based on the Semantic Links engine. So I created several classes for this (I used Protege, but now I’m going to create own class designer). These classes are:

• Catalog (the catalog itself). It contains only list of Topics and HeadTopics.
• HeadTopic – is a simple class that visualizes a title and some html page as a description.
• Topic – This lists innovation companies within some area (IT, Astronomy, etc…).
• Provider (lets say innovation company). It contains all information about innovation company including:
• List of projects with they descriptions (showcase)
• Attributes of the company (address, phone, etc…)
• Tags
• Project – Just description of project.

Classes are depicted below:

After that I tuned look & feel for these classes. I just specified what widgets to use for attributes. For TopicList I specified MasterDetailWidget and specified Topics Attribute as a master list. ListWidget will be used to visualize and provide behaviors for Topics (and HeadTopics) list. The detail area stays empty. This will be loaded when some item selected in a master list.

I don’t want to describe all classes, but I’ll describe most complex class in my ontology: Provider. Provider contains 10 attributes and I specified widgets for them:

• ImageWidget for ImageLabel attribute
• LabelWidget for:
• Title
• Country
• City
• Email
• SiteURL
• TextWidget for Description
• ListWidget for:
• Phones
• Showcase
• Tags

Most of them are depicted below:

That and now I have a result that can be simply checked if you have IE browser. Just press button in the “SemanticLinks Demo” section (Right Top area of the blog). If you have Microsoft IE browser then you can play with it and see the results.