Practical RDF

Chapter 7. Editing, Parsing, and Browsing RDF/XML

Up to this point the only “moving parts” associated with RDF/XML have been those associated with the RDF Validator. Chances are good that this will always be your most important tool when working with RDF/XML. However, the RDF Validator isn’t the only helpful tool, utility, or application for reading, validating, or writing serialized RDF. Several editors, parsers, browsers, and converters are available; we’ll look at some of them in this chapter.

Though much of the technology associated with RDF and RDF/XML is geared toward developers, using many of the RDF/XML utilities requires little or no development experience. You may have to have to have certain software installed, but for the most part, it is either easy to install or is installed on your system.

All the applications and utilities in this chapter are a great way of getting familiar with RDF/XML whether you’re a markup person, a developer, or just an interested bystander, because all the applications focus on either reading or creating RDF/XML—not on the development necessary to get to that point.

BrownSauce

After you’ve worked with RDF/XML for a while, you can read the formatted data and the structures quite easily. However, many people prefer to use a visual tool of some form for this purpose. There are graphical tools and editors, which I’ll discuss later, but for now I want to demonstrate BrownSauce, a specialized RDF/XML browser.

One of the most useful tools I used while ...