Danny on : Data-Oriented Web Browser

Not a new idea, but I thought I'd try and find out how far we've got and braindump a little. I'm making the fairly big assumption that a general-purpose data browser would feasibly useful/usefully feasible in addition to application- or task-specific tools (i.e. use X for your contact/social data, Y for your project management data, Z for your shopping list).

Historically Web browsers provide simple display of (linked) HTML documents obtained via a subset of HTTP, and that's still their primary use. Not very promising for use on the Web of Data without a lot of server-side magic.

But, as well as supporting increasingly sophisted UI elements, they have built-in support for a Turing-complete language, Javascript. The HTTP limitations can be worked around. So while there may still be potential for a totally new breed of data-oriented Web browsers built from scratch as Rich Internet Applications, current browsers have the potential do do whatever's needed. Although they're pretty much limited to playing a client role, in effect they can be whatever kind of Intelligent Agent you like. The bonus is that everyone's already got a browser on their desktop/tablet/mobile - it's an easy path to deployment either for a plugin or better style as code-on-demand.

What's needed for a Data-Oriented Web Browser?

I'm not sure if the Tabulator is still actively maintained (if not, why not!?), but that gave a good indication of the kind of thing that is possible. Taking a step back, the Web of Data is really the same thing as the Semantic Web, and what's new about the Semantic Web isn't the "Semantic" but the "Web" (once again I've lost the source of that quote). How did/do people work with data without the Web? Typically SQL databases and spreadsheets. From those we can lift SQL queries and command-line tools, stored procedures and database forms (this is rather a confession, but back in the day when I first encountered MS Access it blew me away). Then of course there's the spreadsheet UI paradigm, a grid of cells which can be filled with pretty much anything, including most significantly on-the-fly calculated values.

So here's an initial shopping list:

an in-memory* graph data structure support (rdfstore-js looks the most advanced right now)

a spreadsheet-like view (I bet David Huynh has got stuff like this, if not, how hard could it be with a and jQuery? :)

a little language for concisely expressing Web operations, e.g. running SPARQL queries, that could be used inside the spreadsheet (the RDF path-following DSL in Apache Clerezza could be useful here too - link please Henry)

tools for building app-specific forms (quite a few tools support custom views of particular classes, e.g. foaf:Person, Fresnel might help here)

the ability to write as well as read data (this shouldn't need saying)

* persistence would be provided by the Web

I doubt it's possible to say up front what would be a good user-friendly way of setting this stuff up. But given a bunch of scripts that supported these elements, I reckon with a bit of trial and error dogfood use, within a few iterations something really useful could be possible.

Thoughts? Volunteers? Startups? :)

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