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224

answers:

2

I'm looking for a graphical browser for examining large networks of OWL/RDF instances. Protege's instance browser isn't really useful and if COE supports instance browsing, I've not discovered how. Network size is around a million nodes.

I'm hoping to be able to search for an instance, expand it to show its relationships, and explore other instances from there. Graphical would be nice, but a plain Jtree would do too.

+1  A: 

The Tabulator project from the W3C is designed for browsing RDF data sets. It provides an add-in for Firefox, that may facilitate your explorations. it also has features to make your data browsable remotely using AJAX.

Andrew Matthews
Thanks for the lead. Couldn't make it work on first try but will try again later.But I'm afraid the firefox-only restriction and browser security problems will rule this out for my application. This is a federal application in which some of the RDF sites are sensitive (not all, but some). Anything that even smells of "a security problem" is knee-jerk fatal in this world.Research note: making semantic web work in a world with secrets needs thought!! ;)
Brad Cox
Very true, Brad, but I guess no more true than in any other aspect of web development. I guess you're just lucky that in the gov environment there is a will to address issues of security!
Andrew Matthews
A: 

The MIT Simile project developed a faceted browser for RDF called Longwell. This was a research project. Development has now languished, and their demos seem to be broken; however, I can attest to the fact that it works. I use it regularly to browse an extremely miscellaneous collection of RDF instance data on my local machine.

Longwell is written as a Java web application. It comes with its own jetty server or can be run as a servelet. It can be run in memory, or with a variety of back-ends. It parses both rdf/xml and n3, and is highly configurable via velocity templates, css, and the 'Fresnel' RDF display ontology. It's a pity it hasn't been pursued further; I've found its ui to be very agreeable, and particularly useful is the fact that it will browse any RDF instance data you like, with or without schemas or ontologies.

jjon