The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.

Following this idea, some websites started to publish semantic data a little while ago. From all the initiatives, we can note a project called DBpedia which aims to be the semantic version of Wikipedia. Of course many technologies were developed to encode and query all these new information.

The one we are interested in for this project is called Sparql. It uses a SQL like syntax and enables to query semantic data sets.

Let’s say you want to find something in DBpedia. You have 2 options:

• Browse the articles and find the bit of information you want reading the texts
• Write the Sparql query which will return the desired information

Of course to write the query you will need a bit of knowledge on how the data set is formed and on Sparql, but using this you can automate the gathering of information.

Websites like DBpedia offer a Sparql endpoint where you can type in your queries. The main problem with this is that you need some knowledge of the data set you’re querying.

The idea of the project was to include some logic in the endpoint to make as easy as possible the use of this tool. To this end, I created a Sparql editor with advanced features such as auto-completion and error prevention.

When you access the endpoint, it will ask you which dataset you want to query. This will allow to get the namespaces, classes and properties available which you can consult and will appear in the auto-completion.

More details will come in a second post and a demo version will be available soon !

• Browse: by buildings, floors, rooms. You can see computers and phones of a room and to which patch panel they are linked.
• Search: To access directly a specific device in the model
• Generate reports: in Excel format. The reports can be generated from multiple points of view (server room, patch panel, computer’s room)

Many information can be added to each device such as VLAN, network speed, brand, model, etc … The application supports user profiles and different permissions can be granted to control edition and access to the model. For a company, such an application provides:

• Tools for reducing costs: For example, unused ports on switches can be easy noticed, the number of available network sockets in a room is directly available, etc …
• Tools for improving reacting in case of a problem: The location of a computer and the wire to unplug on a patch panel can be immediately found

The application was delivered as a Java Servlet. The core processing and the database access are performed in Java and the display is handled by JSP and JavaScript.

Panodoc is currently used by Region Centre based in Orléans, France. It contains more than 3000 devices (including computers, phones and servers) in a complex network.

Screenshots:

1. Index page
2. Search form
3. Stack of switches

Report:

1. French report (Microsoft Word Document)

• Development Working Group: in charge of the release of new versions
• Bug Squad: in charge of the maintenance of supported versions

I had the chance to have Andrew Eddie as mentor. Andrew is a core member of the project and was the lead developer of Mambo before the fork. Despite the fact we are living at opposite position on Earth, which is not the best to communicate, I thank him for his support and help during the project.

The project was called GeoComponent and has the following features:

• Articles can be geotagged
• Profiles can be geotagged
• Different ways of geo tagging can be provided as plugins (Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, etc)

This was develop for Joomla! 1.5 and therefore is not compatible with 1.0. The code can be found on JoomlaForge under the Summer of Code 2007 project. The name of the tracker is JGEO.

The original proposal can be found here.

The project was successfully completed and I was invited to join the Development Working Group.

Being involved in the development of Joomla!, it is also an opportunity to see what the other applications are capable of and maybe find some useful features we should consider implementing !

After only a few days playing around with WordPress, I must admit I am very impress how easy it is to set up a blog and quickly customize it.

Image found on Flickr