RDFWeb and Friend of a Friend (FOAF): Spring v1.3.1: a MacOS X desktop tool with FOAF support

June 24, 2003

Spring v1.3.1: a MacOS X desktop tool with FOAF support

UserCreations have just announced the release of Spring v1.3.1 for MacOS X.

Spring provides a canvas-style desktop interface, replacing the ageing 'documents and folders' metaphor with a UI based on several content types (people, places, products, books, music, ...), with appropriate kinds of action associated with each type of thing. So you might invite a person to an event, draw a map of a location, etc.

Version 1.3 added 'drag and drop' FOAF support:

Friend of a Friend (FOAF) format is an increasingly common web format for people. If you see a FOAF button on a web page, drag it in to Spring

This support is improved in v1.3.1: a "Refesh From Web" feature allowing FOAF-derived person entries in Spring to pick up the changes from remote FOAF files.

So needless to say, I've been experimenting with Spring on my Mac laptop, and it looks pretty interesting and a hint at what desktops might evolve into. I really like the way it associates actions with entity-types in a way that takes advantage of remote Web services. That, coupled with the "refresh from Web" approach to using remote RDF/XML descriptions (FOAF etc.) is quite a compelling combination.

So in practice, I found the FOAF support worked with some but not all FOAF files from the public FOAFBulletinBoard. I'm not sure what the issue is, perhaps something to do with the mime-types these documents are served up as, or perhaps Spring has certain expectations for the syntactic form of a FOAF document. If others are trying out the FOAF support, perhaps leave comments here or at the UserCreations article, perhaps we can figure out how to help.

Posted by danbri at June 24, 2003 01:10 PM | TrackBack

Comments

There is more technical detail on the Spring FOAF implementation in their earlier article (http://www.usercreations.com/weblog/2003/05/19.html#a2232
):

If the web server is serving up FOAF with application/rdf+xml, then we transparently do the transformation. Otherwise, the user needs to choose "Person (FOAF)" in the sheet that appears.

The FOAF data is apparently imported using an XSLT:

http://www.usercreations.com/spring/objects/people/Person%20(FOAF).xsl

A number of other projects have used XSLT with FOAF, although it isn't a perfect match since the RDF representation allows for a few different encodings. Perhaps we should be clearer in the FOAF spec about some conventions for writing FOAF in XML, even though most current FOAF tools only care about the RDF 'view' of the data.

Morten's FOAF explorer (http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/) is also XSLT-based. A compare/contrast of the different XSLTs might be useful...

Posted by: Dan Brickley on June 24, 2003 01:47 PM

As a followup, I've started a thread on the FOAF development list, http://rdfweb.org/pipermail/rdfweb-dev/2003-June/011267.html to investigate ways of making it easier for FOAF to be processed using XSLT tools.

Posted by: Dan Brickley on June 24, 2003 02:48 PM

Dan.

Appreciate the link and kudos!

We upgraded the FOAF stylesheet in Spring 1.3.1, but didn't update the remote file. (The stylesheet is local. The remote file was for illustration.) I'll update it with a note that it's illustrative.

The actions file (actions.xml) that defines the behavior is remote and is in the same directory.

I'll follow-up on the mail list.

Robb

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