Thursday, March 6, 2008

Semantics in the wild: new jOWL wine Demo

I've prepared a more ambitious jOWL demo that shows off some of the reasoning capability. For the unacquainted, jOWL is a 'semantic' javascript library, under development by OntologyOnline.org, with the intention to make OWL-RDFS files (see also the previous article on OWL) a little more accessible, and thereby bring web3.0 technology another step closer to the user.

The thing about the demo that cheers up the geek within is: there is absolute no server-side scripting involved and no database access is required, all the reasoning is taken care of by your own computer.
It's a great example on how added semantics might influence your future browsing experience. The visuals don't change (web2.0 got that packed to go for us), but the user experience could. There is suddenly some 'smartness' in browsing, and it is something one might quickly get accustomed to. Like all great technology, you should hardly notice it until it's gone, most of it happens under the hood.

I'm still polishing some of the details, and will continue to do so for quite some time, adding more features as we go, but the code is crossbrowser compatible (tested on Firefox and Internet explorer) and I wanted to share that with you.
Expect more demo's in the future as well.

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