MOAW – URI’s Everywhere

                    Laurian Gridinoc and Mathieu d’Aquin

                      Knowledge Media Institute (KMi)
              The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
                    {l.gridinoc, m.daquin}@open.ac.uk

    The manipulation of Semantic Web data is a relatively difficult and un-
friendly task, generally carried out only by experts or technology enthusiasts.
URIs of semantic resources for example are not really easy to manipulate, as
rich and friendly interfaces allowing to understand and reuse them are still re-
quired. Therefore, the current status of the integration of such technologies with
more traditional Web interfaces hampers their adoption by a broader public. Of
course, many initiatives are currently focusing either on building systems using
Semantic Web technologies in a way transparent to the user (e.g. Revyu.com1 )
or in integrating semantic data in the traditional activities of the Web 2.0 user
(e.g. MOAT2 ).
    MOAW (pronounce like mauve: kmõvk) intends to provide a simple and
lightweight contribution to such initiatives. MOAW can be seen as a URI sug-
gestion tool, building on the “auto-completion” feature made popular by Web
2.0 websites and Google keyword suggestion. Basically, MOAW can be attached
to any text field (HTML input element) so that, while typing, suggestions of
URIs would appear that can be selected to replace the corresponding word (see
figure 1). The URIs suggested by MOAW are discovered thanks to Watson. Wat-
son3 can be seen as a search engine for the Semantic Web, crawling, indexing
and providing access to Semantic Web resources for applications.
    One important strength of MOAW is that, thanks to the use of flexible tech-
nologies, it can be easily applied to any online Web form without having to edit
the corresponding webpage: URIs coming from virtually anywhere on the Web
can be reused virtually anywhere on the Web. In addition, as can be seen in fig-
ure 1, MOAW not only displays the suggested URIs, but also provides, thanks
to Watson, a rich description of each URI so that it can be properly understood
and selected by the user.

Underlying technologies: In practice MOAW takes the form of a bookmarklet:
a link is dragged onto the bookmarks of the client browser and, whenever this
bookmark is clicked, the Javascript code of MOAW is “injected” into the current
webpage. This procedure for “installing” MOAW is therefore relatively simple
and provides an homogeneous way to extend the capability of any web form, in
potentially any browser.4

1
  http://revyu.com
2
  http://moat-project.org/
3
  http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk
4
  Note that the current prototype version only works with Firefox.
       Fig. 1. MOAW suggesting URIs for “tom” on the Revyu.com website.




    Once activated, MOAW will load the necessary scripts and libraries, and
attach the auto-completion feature to any “imput” field in the current web-
page. This feature is based on the JQuery auto-complete plugin5 , that has been
customized to search and display URIs of entities from Watson. Searching and
retrieving rich description of URIs is realized through the Watson Javascript
library, which is based on AJAX for the communication with the Watson server.
Finally, the description of each URI (type, relations, link to Watson for “More...”
information) is displayed thanks to a JQuery tooltip plugin.6

What to do with it? The original motivation for the development of MOAW
was the possibility to easily bring URIs for the purpose of editing semantic
data in the (next) version of Tabulator.7 However, MOAW is a nice little tool
that can be used anywhere a web form is present and it makes sense to fill
it with URIs. It can be envisaged, for example, to use it for tagging resources
with URIs instead of terms in various systems (blogs, collaborative bookmarks,
etc.) Another interesting scenario can be, whenever HTML is edited online, to
facilitate the integration of RDFa annotations.
    The current prototype corresponds to an early, untested implementation.
We intend to improve it both on the level of robustness and of the features
it provides. The source code can be retrieved from the web page of the project
(http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk/MOAW) and is open to any form of contribution.
5
  http://www.bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-autocomplete/
6
  http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-tooltip/
7
  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14773/