MadMode

The SIMILE Timeline is a nifty hack. DanBri writes about Who, what, where, when? of the Semantic Web, and in a message to the Semantic Web Interest Group, he asks

TimBL, any plans for Geo widgets to be wired into the tabulator?

Indeed, there are. Stay tuned for more on that... from the students who are actually doing the work, I hope. But I can't wait to tell everybody about the calendar view. Give it a try:

1. Start with the development version of the tabulator.
   • If you haven't been following tabulator development from the Dec 2005 debut, you'll probably need to tweak your about:config as detailed in the security section of the tabulator help file.
2. Select a source of calendar info. Morten's SPARQL Timeline uses RSS. The tabulator calendar groks dc:date, so something like W3C's main RSS feed will work fine. Put its URI in the tabulator's URI text field and hit "Add to outliner".
   

   When it's done it should look something like this:

   
   • For fun, open the Sources tab near the bottom. Note that the tabulator loads the RSS and DC schemas, plus all the schemas they reference, and so on; i.e. the ontological closure. Hmm... the RSS terms seem to be 404.
     
3. Now navigate the outline down to one of the items.
   
   and then re-focus (shift click) on the rss item class itself, and then open an item and select the date property.
   
4. Now hit "Tabulate selected properties". You'll get a table of items and their dates.
   
5. OK, so much for review of basic tabulator stuff. Now you're all set for the new stuff. Hit Calendar and scroll down a little:
   

Note the Export button with the SPARQL option. That's a whole other item in itself, but for now, you can see the SPARQL query that corresponds to what you've selected to put on the the calendar:

SELECT ?v0 ?v1 
WHERE 
{ 
    ?v0 <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type> <http://purl.org/rss/1.0/item> .
    ?v0 <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/date> ?v1 .

Fun, huh?