The Tetherless World Weblog

The Linked Open Government Data group has worked hard to make available US Government data as RDF, and over the past year they’ve introduced some really great tools for exploring government data. One of those tools, the White House Visitors app, is now a native app for the iOS product family. The native app provides live querying of the LOGD triple stores, queries DBpedia for more information about important people, uses the New York Times linked open data to find the latest articles, and pulls images using Freebase. For travel, the application caches data so that existing queries can be viewed when Internet connectivity is intermittent.

See the White House Visitors App on iTunes Preview or download it from the App Store.

Screenshots:

White House Visitors app finds the top 25 visitees (configurable) and lists them decreasing order.

Visualize the visitors and visitees in graphical form.

Using linked data, the White House Visitors app can find out more about people listed in the original dataset.

I’m currently at the annual meeting for the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and a few hours ago I was attending a set of presentations by the Internet TG on Input and Output on the Web. One of the talks that caught my attention was by Wayne Shebilske of Wright State University on the use of screen readers to help impaired students complete tasks within educational programs such as WebCT, student status management software, and the like. There seem to be many problems with such tools as Dr. Shebilske pointed out based on his study. I think this could be a prime candidate for SW technologies to step in to improve the end user experience. I foresee using such tools along with technologies like RDFa to give the user a better representation of the content being displayed and improving the overall quality of life for these individuals.

Evan

The Tetherless World invites users of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch to try out our new ontology browser, OWL Mobile.

OWL Mobile is powered by Jena and Pellet, operating remotely, to provide speed and battery performance mobile devices users expect from their applications. Load one or more ontologies through the Load Ontologies tab. Supply a URL to a custom ontology or use the list of past ontologies. Once you’ve loaded an ontology, use the “Classes”, “Properties”, and “Individuals” tabs to browse through the ontology. Clicking on an item will expand it and give additional information about that particular object. Links which point to other members of the ontology will switch to the appropriate URI when clicked. External links such as web pages, email address, and phone numbers will open the appropriate application on iPhone (phone numbers won’t work on the iTouch) when activated.

Point Safari to http://onto.rpi.edu/demo/owlmobile2/ to try the application. Feel free to bookmark it or add it to the home screen for easy access.

Evan Patton