Frederick Giasson penned an interesting post earlier today that highlighted the RDF Middleware services offered by Triplr and the Virtuoso Sponger

Some Definitions (as per usual):

RDF Middleware (as defined in this context) is about producing RDF from non RDF Data Sources. This implies that you can use non RDF Data Sources (e.g. (X)HTML Web Pages, (X)HTML Web Pages hosting Microformats, and even Web Services such as those from Google, Del.icio.us, Flickr etc..) as Semantic Web Data Source URIs (pointers to RDF Data).

In this post I would like to provide a similar perspective on this ability to treat non RDF as RDF from RDF Browser perspective.

First off, what's an RDF Browser?

An RDF Browser is a piece of technology that enables you to Browse RDF Data Sources by way of Data Link Traversal. The key difference between this approach and traditional browsing is that Data Links are typed (they possess inherent meaning and context) whereas traditional links are untyped (although universally we have been trained to type them as links to Blurb in the form of (X)HTML pages or what is popularly called "Web Content".).

There are a number of RDF Browsers that I am aware off (note: pop me a message directly of by way of a comment to this post if you have a browser that I am unaware of), and they include (in order of creation and availability):

  1. Tabulator
  2. DISCO - Hyperdata Browser
  3. OpenLink Ajax Toolkit's RDF Browser (a component of the OAT Javascript Toolkit)

Each of the browsers above can consume the services of Triplr or the Virtuoso Sponger en route to unveiling a RDF Data that is traversable via URI dereferencing (HTTP GETing the data exposed by the Data Pointer). Thus you can cut&paste the following into each of the aforementioned RDF Browsers:

  1. Triplr's RDF Data (Triples) extractions from Dan Connolly's Home Page
  2. The Virtuoso Sponger's RDF Data (Triples) extractions from Dan Connolly's Home Page

Since we are all time challenged (naturally!) you can also just click on these permalinks for the OAT RDF Browser demos:

  1. Permalink for Triplr's RDF Data (Triples) extractions from Dan Connolly's Home Page
  2. Permalink for the Virtuoso Sponger's RDF Data (Triples) extractions from Dan Connolly's Home Page