In my last post, I said, a little tentatively, that it should be possible to build entirely client-side semweb applications using the Convert service. I was tentative because it seemed like it ought to work, but I hadn’t actually tried it.

So I tried it, and yes, it works!

Yesterday, I put together a widget that adds comments functionality to any page, or page section. Just add this markup to the section you want to have comments on:

<div class="sioc-has_reply"></div>
<script type="text/javascript"
charset="utf-8"
src="http://n2.talis.com/svn/playground/kwijibo/javascript/sioc-comments/bundle.js">
</script>

Ok caveat - I only wrote it yesterday afternoon, it worked for me, on my macbook, but haven’t tested it on IE of any flavour, and tuukah, in #sioc (who was kind enough to try it for me) had problems with firefox on linux.

Anyway, what it does is this: You add the markup, and the page gets a comments form, with fields for your URI, and your comment. When you type in your URI and move to the next field, it will try to dereference your URI and retrieve your foaf:name.
When you submit the form, it will save your comment as RDF to a platform store. The comment will be retrieved from the platform, and displayed on the page. Next to your name in the comments list, is a button called ‘Activity’, which will retrieve a list of all the other posts you have commented on using the widget - these could be anywhere on the web.

I put up a test page you can try it out on.

Now admittedly, it doesn’t look very pretty (assuming you get it to work), and some blatently lacking features are some kind of identity authentication process, and a way for page owners to remove spammers and trolls from their comments. These would take a little bit of custom server-side code to implement.

That asides, as a proof of concept, I think it’s pretty cool (if I do say so myself!) - it takes an existing style of application (a js comments widget), and shows that by adding a URI, you get all kinds of other possibilities. You could have another widget that analysed the FOAF profile’s of the commenters through their URIs, and visualised how incestuous your readership is (eg: do they all know each other? do they all comment on the same blogs?).

It also provokes all kinds of other interesting ideas - there are lots of other sorts of widgets that could take this idea of user input distributed across the web, and working locally on their own pages, but using the network to build up a value greater than the sum of its parts. And here, RDFa starts to look like a good way of exposing the retrieved RDF in HTML for the browser to potentially do more stuff with. Perhaps not just exposing the RDF, but also the SPARQL endpoint it pulls it from.

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