[rdfweb-dev] Semantic web dashboard

[Edd Dumbill]

Via Matthew Garrett's diary on Advogato, I came across a project being
hacked up by Ximian's Nat Friedman, "Dashboard",
http://www.nat.org/dashboard/

Something like this for the semantic-web-on-my-desktop has been a long
term wishlist item of mine.  Nat's implementation strategy seems to
roughly concur with what I envisaged: instrumenting desktop applications
to notify a daemon process about what they're doing.  His design
parameters are instructive. I quote:

* Integration with frontend applications must be trivial.

* Zero user interaction should be required in almost all cases.

* Authorship of new backends (the things that find, index, and match
relevant objects with whatever the user is doing) must be
straightforward and compartmentalized. Right now, you only have to
implement two functions.

* Highly visual related-object presentation.

There seem to be some hacking opportunities here, either for a
cross-platform reimplementation based on RDF technology, or (more
interesting to me) a plugin for Nat's software that sits on top of and
makes use of a triple store.  (Mono/C# bindings for Redland, Dave?)

FOAFiness would be low hanging fruit: a FOAF plugin could query a
FOAFbot for information about a current correspondent, it could perform
background FOAF discovery via sniffing <link../> tags, and so on.

-- Edd

-- 
Edd Dumbill.  More from me at <http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog>
Managing Editor, XML.com, XMLhack.com; Chair, XML Europe 2003