| In order for the Semantic Web to prosper, data needs to be easy to visualize and browse. Current systems for displaying semantic data on the Web generate insufficient domain-independent views or require the adoption of complex ontological languages for display definition. Other systems focused on extracting RDF data from existing web pages are highly dependent on the structure of the HTML file, and may lead towards higher long-term maintenance costs. I present OWL-PL, an easy to use, XSLT-inspired language for transforming RDF/OWL into HTML for display on the Web. OWL-PL includes data selector tags inside an HTML file, and thus encourages heavy reuse of existing technologies, such as CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX. This coupling with HTML reduces the learning curve on traditional Web designers, while allowing for creation of the same rich interfaces that Web users have become accustomed to. Embedding data selector tags inside an HTML file ensures that current Web API's and widgets are immediately available to designers, and allows the language to evolve automatically with current web technologies, such as HTML5 and CSS3. The use of data selector tags in OWL-PL promotes a clean separation of raw data from document structure, similar to the separation of document structure and formatting provided by Cascading Style Sheets. OWL-PL permits the reuse of view information across ontologies using semantic inference and allows the end-user to switch between all available views on the fly. I implement an OWL-PL parser and demonstrate a real world example showing that it is easy and intuitive to create HTML views of semantic data. |
