MOAW

The manipulation of Semantic Web data is a relatively difficult and unfriendly task, generally carried out only by experts or technology enthusiasts. URIs of semantic resources for example are not really easy to manipulate, as rich and friendly interfaces allowing to understand and reuse them are still required. Therefore, the current status of the integration of such technologies with more traditional Web interfaces hampers their adoption by a broader public. Of course, many initiatives are currently focusing either on building systems using Semantic Web technologies in a way transparent to the user (e.g. Revyu.com) or in integrating semantic data in the traditional activities of the Web 2.0 user (e.g. MOAT).

MOAW (pronounce like mauve: |mõv|) can be seen as a URI suggestion tool, building on the ``auto-completion'' feature made popular by Web 2.0 websites and Google keyword suggestion. Basically, MOAW can be attached to any text field (HTML input element) so that, while typing, suggestions of URIs would appear that can be selected to replace the corresponding word. The URIs suggested by MOAW are discovered thanks to Watson. Watson can be seen as a search engine for the Semantic Web, crawling, indexing and providing access to Semantic Web resources for applications.

In practice MOAW takes the form of a bookmarklet: the only thing you have to do to install it is to drag the following link to your bookmarks:

Whenever this bookmark is clicked, the Javascript code of MOAW is ``injected'' into the current webpage and input fields are attached with the MOAW feature. You can try for example on the following text field ("Timbl" is a nice example):

(Note: you may need to click on the word to see the suggestions after clicking on the MOAW bookmarklet).

Laurian Gridinoc and Mathieu d'Aquin are the main developers of MOAW. MOAW makes use of a number of third party libraries including this JQuery auto-complete plugin and this JQuery tooltip plugin. The main source code of MOAW is contained in the Init.js file. Any form of contribution is welcome.