Knoten v 0.1, (C) Knud Möller, DERI, NUIG readme.txt ==================== What is it? ==================== With Knoten, you can download data from the the Web and integrate it with your desktop. You can download things like your del.icio.us tags (soon ;-), RDF files, or Topic Maps (soon ;-). Each tag, resource or topic will become an object on your desktop - it will be indexed by Spotlight, and you can connect it to other objects (e.g. with Kante), like the contacts in your address book or events in your calendar. You could, for example, download an ontology of countries and link your contacts to the countries they live in, or your events to the countries where they take place. In other words, you will tag files and objects on your desktop, but instead of tagging them with plain text strings, you will tag them with URIs which are used by many other people as well. =================== How to build Knoten =================== First of all, you have to get the source! You can check the latest version out via Subversion like so (provided you have Subversion installed): svn co http://kantenwerk.org/svn/kantenwerk/Knoten/trunk/ To build Knoten from source, there are a few prerequisites. I use the following external libraries and frameworks: - Redland RDF Libraries [1]: Dave Beckett's Redland library is used to parse and query the RDF graphs which Knoten downloads from the Web. If you want to build Knoten from source, you'll have to install Redland first. The "User Header Search Paths" and "Library Search Paths" in the Knoten target are set to "/usr/local/include" and "/usr/local/lib", respectively, so that's where you have to install Redland (I think these are the basic install directories of Redland's make file anyway). Please note that I'm _not_ using the Obj-C bindings of Redland (they are not maintained any more), but just the plain C version. Redland is licensed under LGPL 2.1 [4]. - RBSplitView [2]: Rainer Brockerhoff's RBSplitView class is a replacement for NSSplitView that has some very nice extra capabilities, e.g. nested split views where you can have one or more views keep a fixed size, while you resize the rest. RBSplitView is included as a framework in the Knoten source distribution, so there shouldn't be anything for you to do about that. RBSplitView is licensed under Creative Commons 2.5 [5]. ================= How to use Knoten ================= Not that you have sucessfully built Knoten, what can you do? To download and integrate an RDF graph ... - Open the "File/New Graph" menu item. - Type in the URL of the RDF file. E.g., you could download an ontology of countries at http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/test/dbork/data/Country.daml - Knoten will now download the file, parse it and extract those resources that conform to certain characteristics (at the moment they only need to have a type). - If a resource has a label, Knoten will use that label to display the resource. Otherwise, it will just use the URI. - Knoten needs to know what it should consider to be a valid label. There are some obvious candidate property, such as rdfs:label, dc:title or foaf:name. Those are considered by default However, you can also add other properties to this list in Knoten's preferences. E.g., the country ontology mentioned above uses neither rdfs:label nor dc:title, but instead http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/ont/Country.daml#name. Just add this to the list of label properties. - In the Knoten window, you see two lists: the graph list to the right, and the resource list in the middle. - The graph list allows you to select which resources you want to look at in the resource list: you can either look at all resources you ever downloaded, or you can restrict the view to specific graphs (there is one graph for each file you downloaded). - If you select a specific resource in the resource list, you will see its details on the right: the label, URI and an image. More details will probably be added in future versions of Knoten. - Currently, only the foaf:depiction property is considered to determine if a resource has an image. In the future, there will probably be a list of properties, which can be extended (like the list of label properties). Now what? - Once you have downloaded some resources, each resource is represented in the file system as a dummy file (in ) they are indexed by Spotlight, and ready to be used by other applications like Kante or Shift. - You can try it out by just opening the the Spotlight search window and typing the label (or part thereof) of one of the resources you downloaded. E.g., after you have downloaded the country ontology, type "Ireland" in the Spotlight search window. One of the results should be the Ireland resource. If you double-click it, Knoten will open with the Ireland resource selected. - Without any further work, the Knoten resources will just show up as "Documents" in the Spotlight search window. However, there is a way to make the Spotlight search integration a good bit nicer: the BSP configurable categories for Spotlight [3] by James G. Speth. If you download and install this little Mac OS X system preference pane, you will be able to define your own categories for the Spotlight search results. E.g., you could define an "RDF resource" category like this: - add a new category, give it a name (e.g. "RDF Resource"), a description and a uniform type identifier (UTI). The UTI is the identifier that is used to uniquely refer to a specific kind of file. Knoten uses "org.kantenwerk.kantendummy", so use that for your new category. Now, if you get any Spotlight search results for Knoten resources, they will show up in their own category! =============== Disclaimer =============== Please not that Knoten (and all other software hosted on kantenwerk.org) is provided “as is”, without any guarantee made as to its suitability or fitness for any particular use. It may contain bugs, so use of the software is at your own risk. =============== Contact =============== If you have any problems using or installing Knoten, or if you would like to make a suggestion, feel free to send me an email: knud.moeller@deri.org External libraries and software: [1] http://librdf.org/ [2] http://www.brockerhoff.net/ [3] http://www.end.com/BSP/ Licenses: [4] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html [5] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/legalcode