Thread by @hondanhon

HandShake (2003)

flickr.com/photos/danhon/…

ABSTRACT

The “semantic web” promises a world-wide-web of machine-readable metadata that will enable efficient searching and the return of relevant information that is not possible with current search engines.

To achieve this goal, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a set of specifications that governs the encoding, exchange and usage of metadata.

RDF allows the identification of resources, properties that apply to those resources, and the values of said properties, and is commonly expressed in the ubiquitous eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML).

RDF relies on the use of vocabularies—definitions for domains of knowledge. Friend of a Friend (FOAF) is such a vocabulary of the expression of information such as an entity’s name, contact details, geographical location and relationships with other entities.

However, the practice of expressing metadata using the RDF and XML standards remains opaque to end-users: RDF rendered in XML is often confusing first glance, and creating an RDF/XML file by hand is by no means as easy as creating an HTML document.

Since the semantic web relies upon the aggregation of large amounts of metadata, its utility is diminished when the barrier to publishing metadata is too high.

This project delivers a graphical user desktop application using Java 1.4.1 and taking advantage of the native libraries available for Apple OS X, which enables the creation, editing and management of a FOAF file in RDF/XML without exposure to the underlying RDF/XML structure.

27 June 2003: Project specification submitted
2 September 2003: Summary document submitted
10 September 2003: Final summary presentation
11 September 2003: Final demonstration to supervisor

😭

Known issues:

- Spider functionality has not yet been implemented, so nothing in the "my web" tab should work at all. If it does, then something's seriously wrong.