Javascript, RDF Searching
I’ve been doing some playing with goofy Javascript stuff lately to try to get my head wrapped around it, since I’m going to be needing to implement it in a few tools at work in the near future.
I’ve so far used it in
1. An admin interface for Athena’s email accounts,
2. An inventory listing for a work project
3. The newest one, a “suggestion” field for Wordnet searches against the RDF store I just imported this morning.
Danny alerted me to the existence of a new Wordnet dataset. I grabbed the full set, dropped it into Redland, and set up a sparql search against it. The top box there is the nifty one though: type in a string (say, apple) and watch the right side as a list of suggestions is populated.
I still need to get it actually doing a Google Suggest-like dropdown box, but haven’t had the time to hack WICK to do what I want as far as that goes.
I’m still learning, and as such, the code is sucky. I wouldn’t recommend reading it for an example: it’s a quick hack, but it works. Still many bugs to work out – for example, if you type apple, it still searches for app, appl, apple in the process. But I’ll get there. (Okay, so I just did a few bug fixes that make it much better, and switched the search mechanism to use MySQL rather than an 11 Meg PHP array. Much better now.)
Anyway, I think it’s cool. RDF people can mark it down in the “another SPARQL datastore”, Javascript people can mark it down as “Another idiot trying to use XmlHttpRequest and doing it wrong.”
Lemme know if you’ve got suggestions!