Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Institute for End User Computing

I've joined the Institute for End User Computing, information about the organisation is here http://www.ieuc.org/. I'm working part time as an International Research Associate based in the UK. As part of this I'm writing about End User Programming, keeping track of other research that's relevant to this and continuing my own research mainly into using semantic web tools to allow user driven programming. If anyone has some interesting research in this area please let me know and I'll link to it, and let the Institute know as well. You could comment on this post or contact me at peter2.hale@uwe.ac.uk.

I think this goal is within site, with a new generation of easier to use and develop semantic web tools, and new environments for the creation of highly interactive web pages and applications it's becoming easier to create environments for end user programming.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Composing the Semantic Web

TopBraid Composer - http://www.topbraidcomposer.com/.

I've been looking for a semantic web tool that combines the functionality I've seen from Protégé, Jena, and a programming environment, and provides management tools to ease the effort of developing software. TopBraid Composer seems very promising, this is a toolset for developing ontologies combines the advantages of ease of use of development of Protégé with searching based on Jena and the Java Eclipse programming environment. This means that if I want to I can create software totally in the TopBraid Composer environment unlike my examples of http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/InteractiveSVGExamples.htm, where I converted source trees to result trees via a separate program http://wiki.vanguardsw.com/bin/browse.dsb?det/Engineering/Aerospace/Wing%20Spar%20Translated%20from%20Protege%20Taxonomy, to perform decisions and calculations. It's good to be able to link different tools like this, but also good to have the choice to work purely within one environment.

I particularly like this blog posting that explains how this tool can Lifting Excel into the Semantic Web on Holger Knublauch's (TopBraid Composer developer) blog http://composing-the-semantic-web.blogspot.com/ on how the application can import and use Excel spreadsheets. This is particularly important for end-user development as spreadsheets are often the first application that end user programmers use to facilitate their software development.

I'll also be looking at General Electric's ACUITy tool which was presented at the Jena conference http://jena.hpl.hp.com/juc2006/proceedings.html, to provide this kind of functionality. http://www.opencyc.org/ also looks interesting but I don't know much about it yet.