Monday, September 15, 2008

Berners-Lee not happy with IE

This is an interesting article that can be found on the BCS (British Computer Society) website http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.21549.

"Internet Explorer is not up to speed with other browsers when it comes to offering support for scalable vector graphics (SVG), according to Tim Berners-Lee.

SVG is often found in online maps as it allows images to be resized or zoomed into without losing resolution.

Mr Berners-Lee, head of W3C, does not like to express preference for browsers and so did not name IE by name, reports the Associated Press.

'If you look around at browsers, you'll find that most of them support scalable vector graphics,' he told the agency.

'I'll let you figure out which one has been slow in supporting SVG.' Firefox, Safari and Google's new browser Chrome all support SVG, while Microsoft prefers a different format called Vector Markup Language - despite W3C giving SVG its support since 2001.

If IE users want to display SVG they need an Adobe plug-in, which is set to have its support ended on January 1st."

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) and Protege

SWRL is a Semantic Web Rule Language Combining OWL and RuleML - http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/SUBM-SWRL-20040521/.

So far in creating ontologies for modelling for my thesis, if-then-else structures were edited using simplified english language. Elenius et al. explain that Protege now supports SWRL. This makes it possible to use SWRL expressions within Protege. So if-then-else and other control structures could be specified using SWRL. Protege provides an expression builder for this purpose. This also opens up the possibility of translating between an english representation of such structures and an SWRL structure or vice versa, so would be useful future research.

Protege support for SWRL is through the SWRLTab, and has been available since 2004 - http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SWRLTab.

This paper by Elenius et al. is available online - The OWL-S Editor - A Development Tool for Semantic Web Services - http://owlseditor.semwebcentral.org/documents/paper.pdf - Daniel Elenius, Grit Denker, David Martin, Fred Gilham, John Khouri, Shahin Sadaati, and Rukman Senanayake - SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA.

This is the relevant paragraph - Refering to their own research - "One aspect of OWL-S services not covered in this paper is the editing of preconditions and effects of processes, and conditions associated with control constructs such as If-Then-Else. In OWL-S, these are normally described in the SWRL language. Currently, we simply provide a text box where users can enter these SWRL expressions. However, we plan to provide more user-friendly editing capabilities. Protege has recently" ... (2004)... "been enhanced with native support for SWRL, including a SWRL expression-builder, which will serve as the basis of this work."

One possible application of this would be using OWL-S, and UML type diagrams to produce interoperable process models diagrammatically.

More information on OWL is at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm#OWL.

More information on SWRL is at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm#SWRLRuleML

The Protege homepage is - http://protege.stanford.edu/.