Noadster is a domain-independent, media-oriented browser for RDF repositories. It can browse any RDF metadata store. While doing so, Noadster integrates the media resources it encounters into composite displays, effective providing hypermedia generation. Noadster works at two levels: local and global. The local level is a pure resource-by-resource traversal through the repository, with navigation only to directly-linked resources. The global level, on the other hand, provides a top-level hierarchy of links through the repository that relate to a user-request topic.
Noadster's local view displays all RDF triples that include a given resource. Each generated display provides hypertext navigation to the Noadster display for the other components of these triples. You can run the Noadster local-view demo for the following repositories: Amsterdam Rijksmuseum — INS2 Staff — CHIME project
Noadster's global view provides a hierarchy of links into local view displays. It displays a hierarchical "Table of Contents" of RDF resources in a given repository for quick access to their local view displays. Noadster generates this hierarchy from a user search string. It groups RDF resources with RDF literals (text descriptions) containing this string into a hierarchy based on common properties they have. The matching resources are (usually) the bottom-most entries in this hierarchy. The entry for each group in the outline references a resource all of its children link to, thus a concept they all share. The foundation of this demo's browsing interface and hierarchy building algorithm come from the Topia Project Demo, which we helped develop. Noadster's contribution is the ability to directly process any RDF code without prior familiarity with it, and its ability to browse an entire repository beyond the outline provided.
The outline of the document appears along the left side of the display. Click on an outline entry at any time to see the Noadster local view for the resource. You can also still click on the links within the local displays for further traversal beyond the outline. Noadster highlights any text matching the search string in the local view. Of course, please note that this demo is in an early phase of development. It is thus subject to frequent changes, as well as a few (hopefully) short-lived quirks.
We thank the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam for providing their metadata and for their permission to use their images.