Tabulator Redux: Browsing and Writing Linked Data

Figure 1. The Tabulator. The first frame shows the Tabulator with an RDF source, the Open Linked Data Project open. The second frame shows information within that source expanded, the third frame shows another source within that source expanded, and finally, the last frame shows that the label of that source has been edited from "Music and artist data interlinked" to "Music and artist data linked on the Semantic Web" ABSTRACT A first category of Semantic Web browsers was designed to present a given dataset (an RDF graph) for perusal in various forms. These include mSpace, Exhibit, and to a certain extent Haystack. A second category tackled mechanisms and display issues around presenting linked data gathered on the fly. These include Tabulator, Oink, Disco, Open Link Software's Data Browser, and Object Browser. The challenge of once that data is gathered, how might it be edited, extended and annotated has so far been left largely unaddressed. This is not surprising: there are a number of steep challenges for determining how to support editing information in the open web of linked data. These include the representation of both the web of documents and the web of things, and the relationships between them; ensuring the user is aware of and has control over the social context such as licensing and privacy of data being entered, and, on a web in which anyone can say anything about anything, helping the user intuitively select the things which they actually wish to see in a given situation. There is also the view update problem: the difficulty of reflecting user edits back through functions used to map web data