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TagTriples

"Tag Triples" is basically a formalization of ad hoc triple systems.

Instead of the rigidity and thoroughness of ESW:RdfXml, you just say:

 lion memberof communitywiki
 bayle memberof communitywiki
 mattis memberof communitywiki
 communitywiki isa group
 lion isa person
 bayle isa person
 mattis isa person
 communitywiki meetsat http://communitywiki.org/

Tag Triples has a website:

http://tagtriples.sourceforge.net/

The basic idea is that when you interpret the file, you make it rigorous. This requires that you know what the file's being used for, where you found it, what the author means, etc., etc.,.

But it's something that's easy to play with, easy to think about.

Performing Queries

There is a website for interacting with TagTriples:

http://phildawes.textdriven.com/jamvat/queryui

You can do queries like: "Show me every title in the database."

 select ?title
 where (?something title ?title)

Which results in:

 title
 ongoing
 New Mac
 Boston ODF Day
 Meeting Hiawatha
 Shopping\, Dell vs. Apple
 RDF.net Is Expiring
 ...

Then if you wonder, "what are those things?" You can write:

 select ?title, ?tag
 where (?something title ?title)
       (?something tag ?tag)

And you get something like:

 title,tag
 ongoing,feed
 ongoing,_:xmlnode-5-1
 New Mac,entry
 New Mac,_:xmlnode-5-14
 Boston ODF Day,entry
 Boston ODF Day,_:xmlnode-5-82
 Meeting Hiawatha,entry
 ...

Here we discover that there's something called an "entry."

Let's look for just entries:

 select ?title
 where (?something title ?title)
       (?something tag entry)

And we see:

 title
 New Mac
 Boston ODF Day
 Meeting Hiawatha
 Shopping\, Dell vs. Apple
 RDF.net Is Expiring
 A Pepper By Any Other Name
 WS-Stardate 2005.10
 ...

Okay, this is cute- but how do I learn what other things there are that ?somethings could tell us?

To do this, we need a graph browser. The only way I know to get to the browser is by the search function:

http://phildawes.textdriven.com/jamvat/search

Search for one of the titles we found, such as "Boston ODF Day", and then look at the data the browser gives you.

Here's a URL that jumps right there:

http://phildawes.textdriven.com/jamvat/browse?subject=Boston+ODF+Day&tag=entry&tag=_%3Axmlnode-5-82

There, we can see that there's an "id" field, which is the URL of the thing.

 select ?title, ?id
 where (?something title ?title)
       (?something tag entry)
       (?something id ?id)

And we get:

 title,id
 New Mac,http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/29/New-Mac
 Boston ODF Day,http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/28/Boston
 Meeting Hiawatha,http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/28/Hiawatha-Bray
 Shopping\, Dell vs. Apple,http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/26/Dell-Huh
 RDF.net Is Expiring,http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/24/RDF.net
 A Pepper By Any Other Name,http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/10/24/Rose-Pepper-Capsicum
 ...

So, it's pretty cool!

Putting in Data

Now, we can load in the data that we had above.

 lion memberof communitywiki
 bayle memberof communitywiki
 mattis memberof communitywiki
 communitywiki isa group
 lion isa person
 bayle isa person
 mattis isa person
 communitywiki meetsat http://communitywiki.org/

You go to the post-data page, …

http://phildawes.textdriven.com/jamvat/post

And paste that block in. (The "lion memberof communitywiki" yadda yadda yadda one.)

Tell it that the format is tagtriples, in the little combo box on the page.

After you've loaded it in, you can confirm it's there, on the graphs page.

http://phildawes.textdriven.com/jamvat/graphs

Perhaps it's not there any more, but when I did it, it had placed the data at:

http://phildawes.textdriven.com/jamvat/graph/2833

(Again, it may be gone by now.)

Now we can put in a query:

 select ?x
 where (?x memberof communitywiki)

…and we get back:

 x
 lion
 bayle
 mattis

W00t!

Discussion

I think this would be easy to scrape from a wiki.

EditNearLinks: PatrickAnderson

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