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How To: Visualize Twine RDF Graphs (Illustrated, Step by Step)

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Special Preface: This is the first item I create for Raven's Twine Tutorials, whose future content & nature remain somewhat undecided. Your help via comments, critique or pointers on what should be here is greatly appreciated!

In the recently released Twine Guide, the Radarians explain in short the Semantic Web and their underlying RDF (Resource Description Framework [Wikipedia]) which is, in part, what Twine's Artificial Intelligence uses to draw inferences about things (see the Twine Guide for more on RDF).

They also show us how we can view Twine's RDF, and visualize the Jurassic Park book's RDF graph with all its connections. But what's missing is exactly how to make those hot visualizations!

Here's my profile's RDF data visualization, for example, and this is what I'll show you how to do in this tutorial, step by step with screenshots:




0. Prerequisites


The  program we'll be using is a Java Network Launching Protocol Application (JNLP) so it'll run on virtually any system (OS X, Linux, Windows, ...) provided that you have the latest Java & Java Web Start installed (which you probably do, but if not download Java here).

You'll then need to download the visualization program, RDF Gravity.

Once you have the file (rdf-gravity.jnlp), continue to the next step.
Sidenote: The file is small (4kb) because Java Network Launching Protocol is what it sounds like: It launches an application from another location via the internet.

1. Launch RDF Gravity


Double-click the rdf-gravity.jnlp - if everything works as it should the application launches and you'll get a dialog asking whether you trust this signature's certificate.



Click "Trust" if you trust it (you have to if you want to continue this tutorial).

2. Find the RDF You Want to Visualize


Now that it's running (you should see an open, ugly gray window) go back to your browser and find an item on Twine that you'd like to visualize. I'm going to use my profile as an example, but as described in the Twine Tour, and in the Feedback and Feature Suggestion twine, you can get RDF from any item by adding "?rdf" at the end of the URL in question (without the quotes!).

So, the specific URL I'll be using is: http://www.twine.com/user/hthorisson?rdf

3. Give the URL to RDF Gravity


Copy the URL you want to visualize, with the added "?rdf", and switch back to the RDF Gravity application.

From the FILE menu, choose "Open URL" and paste in the URL:



(Note that the above image doesn't show the full URL I pasted, but it's still there!)

Now click OK.

4. Enter Your Twine Login Info

Because Twine is in a private, invitation-only beta - you'll have to enter your Twine username and password to access the URLs RDF data. Enter your information in the dialog that appears (depicted below). That is, not your e-mail but your Twine username - "hthorisson" or "whateveryourloginnameis".




5. Bathe in the RDF Visualization Glory!

Once you've entered your password information - RDF Gravity should turn the ugly gray window into a (somewhat prettier) display of the RDF extracted from the URL! That's it! We're done!


(Note that I manually moved nodes around for clarity before I took the screenshot.)


ADDITIONAL TIDBITS

  • To show edge (connection) tags like "isPerson" and "createdDate"; go to the "Configure" menu and select "Show Edges"
  • To stop Gravity from truncating the information boxes, go to "Configure" and select "Show Full Label"


Thanks for reading! Hope it helps and feel free to share additional tips & tricks in the comments.

















Attachments
hrafn-thoriss-rdf.png
rdf-gravity-certificate-dialog.png
rdfgravity-openurl.png
rdfgravity-passwd-dialog.png
rdfgravity-fulldisplay2.png

Comments

  • Public Comments

    • Hrafn Thorri Thorisson
      21 months ago


      "Thanks, Hrafn for outlining these steps. In putting together the semantic web piece for our Tour, I wasn't able to put in all the steps required to install RDF Gravity or even Tabulator."

      No problem. You guys did a great work on the tour. It explains the concepts well and it helped me put together this small tutorial. Not even sure it would've been fitting to have this stuff in the Tour -- many Twinerians probably adore how well Twine hides all the RDF/ontology stuff, and shiver at the sight of it ;)

      "Let us know if you find other useful tools, and we'll do the same in this twine."

      Good idea, will do.
      Raven's Twine Tutorials

    • Lew Tucker
      21 months ago


      Thanks, Hrafn for outlining these steps. In putting together the semantic web piece for our Tour, I wasn't able to put in all the steps required to install RDF Gravity or even Tabulator.

      In a talk I just gave in the recent ETech conference I was able to demo both Tabulator and RDF Gravity to show that each Item in twine has two faces - one in HTML for people, and the other in RDF for machines. With Tabulator I could walk the graph and like Peter, I wish someone would extend RDF gravity to do this.

      Let us know if you find other useful tools, and we'll do the same in this twine.
      Raven's Twine Tutorials

    • Murray Peat Murray Peat
      20 months ago


      Thanks for this tutorial Hrafn. Out of interest, what do you do with an rdf graph when you've got it. Can you give me some examples pleaae.
      Apps :: On Semantic Web & Related Applications

      • Hrafn Thorri Thorisson
        20 months ago


        My pleasure, glad it helped.
        As of yet, the only thing you can do is explore the graph, connections, node names, etc. However, the Radarians are cooking up APIs that will allow anyone to extract the data and use it in their own applications. For example, Freebase has some great examples of user created applications based on the semantic data (check out Dipity).

        With Twine's ever-growing awesome knowledge base, it will be very exciting to see what happens.
        Apps :: On Semantic Web & Related Applications

    • Bent Rasmussen Bent Rasmussen
      20 months ago


      I've used RDF Gravity in the process of prototyping a portal ontology but none of the visualizers I've found really do intelligent beautiful layout. I've seen some very nice RDF graphs around somewhere, so it would be interesting to know of the ultimate visualization software for RDF. Maybe RDF Gravity is the best free software for it, though...

    • peter royal peter royal
      21 months ago


      very nice! i wish RDF gravity let you walk the graph. i can't find something that does the bubble display *and* graph walking.
      Raven's Twine Tutorials

      • Hrafn Thorri Thorisson
        21 months ago


        Thanks! I haven't been working much with RDF visualization. I didn't come across anything via snappy Googling. But there must be something?
        Raven's Twine Tutorials

        • Scott White
          21 months ago


          You could try using the JUNG library (http://jung.sourceforge.net/). You'd just need to tell it how to map rdf to a named entity graph and then customize the UI as necessary but there are a bunch of demos we put up there so for people to check out that try to show how easy it is to build interactive graph applications.
          Raven's Twine Tutorials

    • Hrafn Thorri Thorisson
      20 months ago


      Thought that this might help a few get started.
      RDF Graph for All Twinerians

    • Clive Thompson
      21 months ago


      This is incredibly cool.
      Web 3.0 - Semantic Web

    • Nova Spivack Nova Spivack
      21 months ago


      Nice!!!
      Web 3.0 - Semantic Web

    • Jack D. Logan Jack D. Logan
      19 months ago


      Bent, I, too, am interested in more visualization of RDF. The most interesting visualization tool (not RDF, as I understand it) that I've seen is the one that Twain recommended, seadragon, that is now in the hands of Microsoft - Great video - http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 - also, see Twain's response to my remarks at:
      http://www.twine.com/item/113c5528k-6hr/twine-versus-google-semantics-analogies.
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