[whatwg] Fuzzbot (Firefox RDFa semantics processor) (was: Trying to work out the problems solved by RDFa)

[Manu Sporny]

Calogero Alex Baldacchino wrote:
> That is, choosing a proper level of integration for RDF(a) support into
> a web browser might divide success from failure. I don't know what's the
> best possible level, but I guess the deepest may be the worst, thus
> starting from an external support through out plugins, or scripts to be
> embedded in a webbapp, and working on top of other feature might work
> fine and lead to a better, native support by all vendors, yet limited to
> an API for custom applications

There seems to be a bit of confusion over what RDFa can and can't do as
well as the current state of the art. We have created an RDFa Firefox
plugin called Fuzzbot (for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) that is a very
rough demonstration of how an browser-based RDFa processor might
operate. If you're new to RDFa, you can use it to edit and debug RDFa
pages in order to get a better sense of how RDFa works.

There is a primer[1] to the semantic web and an RDFa basics[2] tutorial
on YouTube for the completely un-initiated. The rdfa.info wiki[3] has
further information.

----------------
(sent to public-rdfa at w3.org earlier this week):

We've just released a new version of Fuzzbot[4], this time with packages
for all major platforms, which we're going to be using at the upcoming
RDFa workshop at the Web Directions North 2009 conference[5].

Fuzzbot uses librdfa as the RDFa processing back-end and can display
triples extracted from webpages via the Firefox UI. It is currently most
useful when debugging RDFa web page triples. We use it to ensure that
the RDFa web pages that we are editing are generating the expected
triples - it is part of our suite of Firefox web development plug-ins.

There are three versions of the Firefox XPI:

Windows XP/Vista (i386)
http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot/download/fuzzbot-windows.xpi

Mac OS X (i386)
http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot/download/fuzzbot-macosx-i386.xpi

Linux (i386) - you must have xulrunner-1.9 installed
http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot/download/fuzzbot-linux.xpi

There is also very preliminary support for the Audio RDF and Video RDF
vocabularies, demos of which can be found on YouTube[6][7].

To try it out on the Audio RDF vocab, install the plugin, then click on
the Fuzzbot icon at the bottom of the Firefox window (in the status bar):

http://bitmunk.com/media/6566872

There should be a number of triples that show up in the frame at the
bottom of the screen as well as a music note icon that shows up in the
Firefox 3 AwesomeBar.

To try out the Video RDF vocab, do the same at this URL:

http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot/demo/video.html

Please report any installation or run-time issues (such as the plug-in
not working on your platform) to me, or on the librdfa bugs page:

http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/librdfa/trac

-- manu

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGg8A2zfWKg
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldl0m-5zLz4
[3] http://rdfa.info/wiki
[4] http://rdfa.digitalbazaar.com/fuzzbot/
[5] http://north.webdirections.org/
[6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPWNgZ4peuI
[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVGD9HQloDI

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.

blog: Fibers are the Future: Scaling Past 100K Concurrent Requests
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/10/21/scaling-webservices-part-2