I’ve published the code behind the Talis Convert Service (production release at stable URL coming soon) as an open source project on Google Code, called Metamorph .

Metamorph is a service aimed at semantic web developers. It is much like triplr, babel, swignition and any23 (please leave a comment pointing to any other similar services).

You give it a(n http) URI, an (optional) input format, and an output format, and it will fetch the document from the web, and convert it into the output format.

Understood input values include:

• Semantic HTML (RDFa, eRDF, microformats, POSH)
• RDF (XML, Turtle, JSON)
• SPARQL-XML
• Facet XML (the response format of the facets service available on all platform stores)

Output for all input formats can be:

• JSON
• JSONP
• HTML

If the input is some form of RDF, you can also ask for:

• RDF (XML, Turtle, JSON, - and the default HTML is rendered as RDFa)
• RSS 1.0
• TriX
• Exhibit (web page, JSON, JSONP)

In addition, if the input is an RDF format, you can specify multiple data URIs, and the results will be merged in the output document. For instance, this conversion merges data from two of my homepages, and a Turtle file.

I’m thinking about removing the TriX output, as I’m not sure it would be used by anyone - the reason I didn’t bother to write a parser for it was because I haven’t seen any data published as TriX in the first place.

I welcome any input on what else would be useful from this web service. I suspect that more output options, while fairly easy to add, would not be very useful. More input options may be useful, but perhaps not significantly so.

I suspect what might be more useful, and more likely to distinguish this from similar RDF converter services, are graph transformation services, which might include:

• Diffs
• Intersects
• Smushing
• Augmenting on property and class type URIs with labels and comments, perhaps retrieved from SchemaCache

Metamorph is coded in PHP, and uses ARC for parsing RDF and HTML, and serialising RDF/XML and Turtle.

Please use the issue tracker for raising any bugs or feature requests.

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jQuery.Talis is a plugin for the popular javascript library jQuery. It acts as a wrapper around the talis convert service, for retrieving json, through jsonp, from the Platform.

You can read about it on the n2 wiki and download it from the n2 svn.

You can use it like this:

$.Talis.Store('schema-cache').sparql('DESCRIBE ',
      function(data){
        $("#Person h1").html(data['http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person']['http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#'][0].value);
});

(This would fetch a description of the foaf:Person class from the http://api.talis.com/stores/schema-cache store, and insert the rdfs:label into the DOM.)

I don’t want to declare this stable yet, but it is usable in it’s current form (I use it in the SIOC Comments Widget). The size currently comes in at ~4k without any compression or minification. So far, it’s only been tested in Firefox, Safari and Opera, so reports of cross-browser problems, and any other bugs, would be appreciated.

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