I found a cool little demo application last week called RDFRoom. It let you visualize RDF files in a Doom-like environment. There is nothing exceptional with the tool considering that many people are doing research and products that help people to visualize RDF files or any other type of digital information [you only have to perform this search to understand what I mean].
However it stimulates me to write some notes about the possible future of user web interfaces.
Just as a quick introduction, RDF (RDFS/OWL) is a way to describe relationships between Internet resources such as websites and their content. (RDFS and OWL are extensions of RDF that let you describe more complex relationships).
One good example of how RDF could be used is FOAF files (Friend of a Friend). A FOAF is the profile of a person. It describes the person’s relationships with other people, and with her or his publications, interests, etc.
The problem is that if you edit a FOAF file, you will not be able to understand anything at first glance. You will have to read the FOAF file using something that presents the information in such a way that it can be read.
You usually have two types of FOAF viewer:
- Text-based, like this FOAF explorer
- Graphic-based, like RDFRoom
The graphic-based FOAF reader is definitely more attractive. With a quick look, you can see the relation between many people and the publications of each of them.
With the emerging trend of “Web 2.0”, the tagging systems, the memetrackers, etc. everybody tries their best to present too much information in too-small text-based web interfaces. These guys have done a good job, but there is a limit (and I have no idea if we have reached it yet).
I’d bet that we will probably see some sort of embedded 3D interfaces in the future “Web 2.0” services to help users to visualize and play with this type of information.
Technorati: FOAF | visualization | rdf | rdfs | owl | web2.0 | web | semantic | 3d | interface | rdfroom |