Fresnel - Display Vocabulary for RDF

[Regis Pires Magalhães]

Fresnel: A Browser-Independent Presentation Vocabulary for RDF

http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/Fresnel-ISWC2006.pdf

Fresnel - Display Vocabulary for RDF

http://www.w3.org/2005/04/fresnel-info/

Fresnel is a simple, browser-independent vocabulary for specifying how RDF graphs are presented.

Presenting Semantic Web content in a human-readable way consists in addressing two issues: specifying what information contained in an RDF graph should be presented andhow this information should be presented. Each RDF browser or visualization tool currently relies on its own ad hoc mechanisms and vocabularies for addressing these issues, making it impossible to share RDF presentation knowledge across applications. Recognizing the general need for displaying RDF content and wanting to avoid reinventing the wheel with each new tool, we developed Fresnel as a browser-independent vocabulary of core RDF display concepts applicable across different representation paradigms and output formats.

Fresnel's two foundational concepts are lenses and formats. Lenses define which properties of an RDF resource, or group of related resources, are displayed and how those properties are ordered. Formats determine how resources and properties are rendered and provide hooks to existing styling languages such as CSS.

Like CSS, Fresnel is designed as a purely declarative language. The Fresnel vocabulary is split into modules for allowing browsers to support limited but well-defined subsets of the language.