sRelationBrowser Semantic Component

Contents

 Introduction

The sRelationBrowser, also known as the Relation Browser or Concept Explorer, is a component that displays networks of nodes and arcs. It is usually used to display conceptual structures described in irXML. These irXML schemas are themselves generally created from OWL2 ontologies, or are directly created in irXML.

Each node in the relation browser is a concept, and each arc is a relationship (also known as an "edge", "predicate" or "property") between two concept nodes. The relationship can be one of sub-concept or one of super-concept.

Additionally this relation browser tool can point to link stories related to each focused node.

 Related Stories

Stories can be related to each concept displayed in the relation browser component. All of these relationship are described in a dataset hosted on a structWSF instance. The related stories are queried to the SPARQL endpoint of the structWSF instance. The sRelationBrowser.xml setting file instructs the sRelationBrowser component the related stories attribute to use to find the related stories. Then, possible related stories will be displayed in the related stories panel in the right sidebar of the component.

The relations between the concepts and the related stories are pre-asserted by a specialized system that creates the assertion file of relatedStoryRelation relations (see table below) or simply by hand by creating triples such as, concept1 relatedStoryRelation story2.

 Important Predicates

Some predicates/attributes describing a record are important for this sRelationBrowser component. This is a list of those important predicates and their usage in the context of the sRelationBrowser component.

Prefixed Attribute Predicate URI Usage
TDB by the setting relatedStoryRelation TDB by the setting relatedStoryRelation The attribute that is used to relate stories to concepts displayed by the sRelationBrowser component. This attribute is defined in the sRelationBrowser.xml settings file.
iron_prefLabel http://purl.org/ontology/iron#prefLabel Preferred label to be displayed in the detail panel
iron_description http://purl.org/ontology/iron#description Description of the concept to be displayed in the detail panel
iron_prefURL http://purl.org/ontology/iron#prefURL Preferred url to be displayed/linked-to in the detail panel

 Styles

Style Name Description
sRelationBrowser Style for the main sRelationBrowser component

 AS3 Usage Examples

  /** Create a resultset object instance from the input structXML data */
  var resultset:Resultset = new Resultset(XML(inputData));

  /** Create the sRelationBrowsercomponent */
  var semanticRelationBrowser:sRelationBrowser = new sRelationBrowser();

  /** Target type to focus on at load time */
  var targetTypes:Array = ["http://mytype"];

  /** Create the schema */
  var schema:Schema = new Schema();
  schema.loadSchema("http://schema.file.url");

  /** Initialize the semantic control */
  semanticRelationBrowser.percentWidth = 100;
  semanticRelationBrowser.percentHeight = 100;
  semanticRelationBrowser.semanticDataProvider = resultset;
  semanticRelationBrowser.targetTypes= targetTypes;
  semanticRelationBrowser.schema= schema;

  /** Add the sRelationBrowser to the main application */
  this.addChild(semanticRelationBrowser);

 MXML Usage Examples

 <sRelationBrowser semanticDataProvider="{semanticDataProvider}"
                    targetTypes="{targetTypes}"
                    schema="{schema}" />

In this example, we assume that the {semanticDataProvider} variable is a Resultset, where the record description is defined, accessible at the creation time of the sRelationBrowser. targetTypes are the types to focus on at load time. The types should be part of the schema. The schema is the conceptual structure to load in the relation browser.

 Related Libraries

This tool is based on the Relation Browser Flex project. It has been enhanced for some special purposes of the Semantic Components, but the basis of this component is based on the Relation Browser application.

This relation browser project is itself related to the Flare visualization framework.