Quick and dirty RDF development: Enter RDFpad
In a recent chat with Tomi and Johannes, we discussed the idea of using etherpad for RDF development. Since we use etherpad for pretty much everything that concerns collaborative writing, why not use it for some quick and dirty RDF development? The results would be immediately online, considerably lowering the barrier for publishing small Linked Data sets. This would be beneficial both for trial-and-error vocabulary development, as well as for teaching Linked Data stuff.
There are just a few bits and pieces missing to make this really work in practice. For example, the text export URL, that provides the “raw” RDF code that would be written in an etherpad, is not really nice, as it consists of several parameters. It also comes with the wrong content header (obviously, because it is meant to provide raw text, not RDF). Moreover, you would only be able to get whatever is written in the etherpad (e.g., Turtle code) – but if you want a different encoding, you’re lost. Finally, there is no way to check whether your RDF code is syntactically correct.
RDFpad solves all of these issues.
Simply enter the URL of your etherpad into the form, and RDFpad will generate a nice human-readable view of your RDF, with export options for different encodings. For example, an etherpad like
http://ietherpad.com/foaf-carsten
results in the “proxied” URI
http://rdfpad.lodum.de/ietherpad.com/foaf-carsten.
This URI can be called by any Linked Data client with any Accept header, and it will forward the client to the corresponding encoding using a 303 redirect.
RDFpad always accesses the latest version of the etherpad; we might extend it in the future so that specific versions of an etherpad can be directly accessed. Moreover, we currently only support reading Turtle as input from the etherpad, as we felt that this is the most intuitive way for human beings to write RDF code (at least that’s how we do it).
You can play around with our demo setup at http://rdfpad.lodum.de. You are most welcome to install it on your own server, or adapt/improve the code: RDFpad is FOSS under an Apache 2.0 license. Grab the code at http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de/~kessler/rdfpad/.
