The demos:

• Wordnet namespace entry for building
• Picdiary home page
• RSS for Picdiary home page
• Picdiary polaroids view
• Pictures of Edd Dumbill
• Pictures of Edd Dumbill, RSS source
• Wordnet-based search for skyscraper
• Wordnet-based search for building
• Wordnet-hierarchy-nav for structure

The logs on the IRC #www2003 channel during the talk are interesting to compare with the slides.

The talk was scheduled amongst a fun-packed Semantic Web series of Celia Romaniuk (Soap Operas and the Semantic Web), Uche Ogbuji (Akara – Part Wiki, Part Blog, Powered by XML and RDF), Jo Walsh (Collaborative Mapping with RDF) and myself.

RSS 1.0 (RDF Site Summary) is a well-known XML format commonly used for syndicating news headlines. By design it is an extensible format in which metadata expressed using any RDF vocabulary can be linked to its component items, while still maintaining compatibility with applications such as newsreaders that may be unaware of such vocabularies. This paper will discuss some interesting applications that can be built with RSS as a base. The annotation of collections of photographs is used as a case study.

Using an RDF representation of Wordnet, the lexical database of English, we attach keywords to photographs to indicate what they objects they depict. With simple inference logic, we create improved search engines over this data. For example, using the hypernym information in Wordnet to extrapolate from keywords, a search for buildings can find hotels, churches, houses and other related photographs. We can automatically build a Yahoo-like hierarchical web site of photographs organised by the meaning of their keywords.

Using the Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) vocabulary, we can record which photographs show particular people. Applications can then display related information with the photograph by using information gathered by spidering the existing network of FOAF information on the web.

Dynamically-built RSS channels are an ideal format for expressing search results; hence people who are interested could use newsreaders to subscribe to new pictures of any Wordnet noun, particular person or other metadeta criteria. This RSS is easily turned into web pages using templating tools. A Blogger-like front page can be built by building an RSS ‘meta-channel’ summary of the 10 newest photo collections.

Processing toolkits for RDF are available in many languages, and RDF’s natural integration with the web’s URI system makes it easy to build applications in a loosely-coupled style. Tools for this project built using the Redland API in Perl and the Jena toolkit in Java easily interoperate, using the RDF output of one as the input of another. New applications can be built by others using any language or environment with RDF and HTTP support (even Mozilla), without needing to be granted any special database access or other privileges.

Update: slides from this and other talks are available.

The class is implemented using the Java Wordnet Library package, which means it requires JDK 1.4.

The major methods are:

• public Synset lookup(String uri)

Takes a URI string such as http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Dog and returns a JWNL Synset object representing the wordnet synset of that URI.

• public String uri(Synset synset)

Takes a JWNL Synset object and returns its canonical URI string from the wordnet namespace.

The constructor takes a filename of a JWNL config file from which to configure the JWNL system.

Compare the HTML version to the SVG version. There’s nothing in the SVG version that couldn’t be rendered in HTML; the interest was in doing the job entirely client-side.

The system builds links into foafnaut and my wordnet picture hierarchy when it finds appropriate metadata about a picture.

Jim’s parser page says the RDF parser needs at least version 5.5 to run under IE. Javascript in SVG is a pain to debug in mozilla; you don’t seem to be able to use mozilla’s javascript console or debugger.

The pics are marked up in the RSS-based picture collections using markup like this:

<item rdf:about=”http://www.picdiary.com/kensington/img_1926.jpg”>
<foaf:depicts><wordnet:Telephone /></foaf:depicts>
</item>

Search results are actually returned in RSS; the html search page is just a wrapper around that. So you can subscribe to pictures of shops if you really want to.

Next steps:

• Add “more like this” links to picture pages that find pictures by navigating the wordnet space
• make a dmoz-style directory of pictures arranged into the wordnet hierarchy
• do similar things with FOAF person information
• do location annotation using jo’s geonet-based namespace
• tie it all together into some sort of coherent website