There are some new components on the eternal beta site. (Probably not only) the DERIans couldn't really get used to my generic tools, so I went back to the drawing board and more or less rewrote the whole stuff (less URIs and qnames, more "classical web site" structure). The new browsers are still based on a shared standard class, but I divided the "resources" section into 5 customized pages (events, projects, documents, people, software) and developed a set of resource-specific SPARQL queries to generate better tailored views. The filter forms are more or less fixed, but I already had a lot of fun with them (although noone seems to owe me beer..).
It took me some time to work around several issues, not only the bnode reference problem I mentioned, but I also needed a better index structure for the RDF store and basic inferencing capabilities in my query engine. I'm currently trying an experimental mechanism to pass OWLchestra-generated class trees to the SPARQL2SQL rewriter which then generates queries that allow me to retrieve
conf:Workshops even when I only specified a type of ical:Vevent. Seems to work, not too sure about scalability issues, but I didn't like the idea of rdf:type 4ward-chaining either, so I'll stick to this approach for the moment.There's a lot new (and hopefully more usable) stuff in the front-end. I've parameterized several of the framework's interface components and can now re-use what I call "Sparqlets": interactive page items that are based on SPARQL queries and JavaScript glue code. A "quick search" sparqlet in the upper right corner of the front page provides a suggest-as-you-type feature and allows you to easily search the whole RDF store. More sophisticated interaction possibilities are provided by the browsers, where you can now decide if a related resource description should be displayed in an inline sparqlet or as a separate summary. I've also integrated my unsmusher/resmusher in resource context menus, so that it's now possible to re-consolidate wrongly merged resource descriptions with a single mouse click, and without having to stop browsing.
but first: sleep.