Capturing my thoughts on the "INQLE Wiki" I have been working on.

[David]

This thread is for capturing my progress toward an INQLE-powered
semantic wiki. It is more for my reference than anything, so I may
restart where I left off as I return to this problem. I will note
that the below quandary has been atypical of the INQLE experience.
Most of the design decisions have dfallen nicely into place, without
significant limitations imposed by Eclipse RAP, Jena, or anything
else.

For starters I am not primarily interested in making a wiki per se
(with versioning, wiki markup). I am however interested in improving
INQLE's facilities for visualization of and faceted browsing of its
data. It occurred to me that in the process of delivering this
enhancement, INQLE would become a bit of a general purpose tool for
publishing data, in addition to its data mining capabilities. As
INQLE already offers a web-based console for creating and managing
high performance semantic databases, plus some data importation
wizards, I figured we are half way toward INQLE the general wiki
engine.

Taking a break after the 0.3 release, I developed some visualization
widgets for RAP, from Google's Visualization API. I thought that
these Google graphs would add a powerful data visualization capability
to INQLE. Making the RAP widgets took some time but in the end the
widgets work pretty well.
My announcement of these widgets here:
http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/article.php?id=6366&group=eclipse.technology.rap

So far so good. Next I began to run into challenges, which will slow
delivery of this INQLE wiki. First, I clued in that INQLE's RAP-
powered console is not ideally suited to a set of publically-
accessible web pages like a wiki. The reason is that RAP operates
like a console (similar to say the Gmail app). Navigating to a new
content page's URL will create a new session. New RAP sessions are
weighty. So it looks difficult for INQLE/RAP to power a website of
multiple content pages, crawlable by a search engine. See this thread
http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.technology.rap/msg06530.html

So I looked into using alternative Java OSGi web technology to power
the wiki. I settled on JSP as it is off the shelf. I implemented the
beginnings of a bundle which will render a JSP. I came up with the
idea for a Java controller servlet to receive a few parameters
(instance URI to render) and assemble a Jena Model object containing
all statements relevant to this instance. The JSP would then take
this Model and render it into a human-viewable and Google-indexable
web page.

So as things stand I have not yet implemented this JSP. Doable but
hard to do it right. Here are some existing active semantic wiki
projects, provided to me by Paolo Castagna of HPLabs.
http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki_projects#Active

Further I am hung up on the architecture of this INQLE wiki. I am
moving in a direction of RAP-powered console and a JSP powered wiki
display. But several of my important ambitions for this wiki involve
what sits between: page editing, with semantic links. How do I power
the page editing?
Edit wiki pages in RAP? Not sure how elegant the linking from the JSP
wiki page to the RAP powered editing page.
Edit wiki pages in JSP? We lose the ability to have dialogs, wizards.
So I have been second guessing the idea to render the wiki pages in
JSP. I hope a clearer solution emerges soon.