[Rdfapi-php-interest] RAP use case: emblem research

[Peter B. <pb...@xs...>]

Hello all,

So I'll be the first to describe on this list a possibly interesting 
situation where RAP is being used.

Before that, I want to express my appreciation for those of you that 
create and maintain RAP. I would never have been able to do what I did 
without RAP. Thank you.

I am writing a PhD thesis in emblem research. (Emblems are combinations 
of a picture and a poem, which used to be very popular a few centuries 
ago). My interpretations of the emblems are stored in RDF, and I make 
the RDF accessible on the web using RAP. See for a sample application: 
http://emblems.let.uu.nl/emblems/lab/metaphor/.

What is it that you can see there?

We have digitised these emblems at the Emblem Project Utrecht 
(http://emblems.let.uu.nl). We transcribed the emblems using the 
Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org) and 
created XML files. In these XML files, some elements represent sections 
of text or regions in the images.

An ontology is then created in RDF Schema, which corresponds to the 
categories of my interpretations of the emblems. In an RDF file I apply 
this ontology and use it to describe the sections of text and picture 
that are contained in the XML file that describes the emblems.

Using the application as you can see it on the web it is now possible to 
query the interpretational findings as stored in the RDF. The query uses 
(mainly) RAP, but also some XSLT stylesheets, in order to present the 
data to the viewer. The data are loaded into a database for performance 
reasons.

In the coming months I expect I'll be working at a cleaner separation of 
the application and the query logic behind it. I should be able to 
re-use the same 'query engine' with arbitrary xml files and ontologies. 
I also want to reduce dependencies on non-RAP processing of RDF data 
(read: stylesheets). And I need a facility for adding annotations to the 
RDF data and display those in the interface.

Best regards,
Peter Boot