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For the first time in ages I've had a couple of days to sit down and look at code. A lot of it was stuff I hadn't finished, dating back a few years. The typical pattern was either getting distracted from the original aims and playing with the fun stuff or aiming to do so much that I never really got past square one. So this time around I've changed my mind, decided to keep the fun stuff (playing with Agents in Scala) separate from the main app work.
The main app in mind here is the <a href="2006/02/02/sweo-suggestion-2-semantic-web-in-a-box/" title="swib">Semantic Web in a Box</a> idea which I'm back to thinking about in a more minimal form, informed a lot by what Rob wrote on his blog - <a href="http://dynamicorange.com/2010/11/15/what-people-find-hard-about-linked-data/">What people find hard about Linked Data</a> - and the stuff in the <a href="http://api.talis.com/stores/training/items/training.html">Talis tutorial</a>. Basically what I'm after is a very easy-to-use Linked Data editor/visualization tool, with support for some kind of pluggability (TBD). There are existing tools which can do this sort of stuff, but the key here is to keep things as simple as possible (and free and open source). Target users are total beginners and experienced folks that want to be able to knock simple stuff together quickly. There's really not a lot to this, and 'wait long by the river and implementation of your plans will float by' usually works, but no-one really seems to have got around to this thing. It'll be a Java/Swing desktop app with the following features:
<ul>
<li>Internal triplestore(s)</li>
<li>RDF editor with various views and syntax validation</li>
<li>SPARQL editor and results viewer</li>
<li>HTTP client (for examining remote resources, crawling and publishing to remote stores/services)</li>
<li>HTTP server (for simulating live data)</li>
<li>HTTP proxy (for examining headers etc)</li>
<li>Basic HTML editor/viewer</li>
</ul>
 What should also be possible is to run it headless, as a live service. Probably more than half the people that read this are likely to have such parts living in their codebases - Java Swing components, Jena, ARQ, and Apache HTTP libs cover an awful lot, the tricky part is wiring them all up in a useful way, with a UI that doesn't confuse. I've made a start on gathering together the bits, but I'm unlikely to get down to a good coding session for a while again, so what follows is really notes to self so I don't forget... So, RDF editor. Currently the main class is org.hyperdata.swing.rdftree.editor.RdfEditor One view is a resource-centered thing, based on a JTree backed by a Jena Model. Like everything else here, it's unfinished and very buggy (notably there's something like an out-by-one error on which row expands). But this should give the general idea, the paths should expand indefinitely :
<img height="579" width="682" alt="rdf tree table" src="live-images/screensot-rdftreetable.png" style="vertical-align: middle;"></img> 
Right now it's only addressing the local model, but it should be reasonably straightforward to hook the HTTP client up to terminal node URIs to go and GET remote data (must check how Tabulator goes about that) and extending the drop-down paths.
Text views for Turtle and RDF/XML (with crude highlighting from JEditorPanes):
<img height="579" width="682" alt="turtle editor" src="live-images/screenshot-turtle-editor.png" style="vertical-align: middle;"></img> 
<img height="579" width="682" alt="xml editor" src="live-images/screenshot-xml-editor.png" style="vertical-align: middle;"></img>
I've only just started looking at a graph view (again!), separate from the stuff above - I just hacked at one of the JGraph demos, long way to go: The launcher for that is org.hyperdata.swing.graph.danja.GraphEditor
 <img height="640" width="870" alt="graph view" src="live-images/graph-screenshot.png" style="vertical-align: middle;"></img>
I've stuck the code over here:
<a href="http://knowledgeforge.net/gradino/wiki/wiki/SemanticWebInABox" title="wiki subversion">source, wiki etc.</a>