Tutorial: Navigate the RDF graph using Brainlet GUI

In DBin users can explore their local RDF batabse trougth a special "view" of the entire graph correspondig to a particular brainlet. Basically this view is given by the result of the GUED operators specified by the brainlet applied to the entire local RDF storage, that is: "show me only waht I am currently interested in".

We think that every specific context domain (e.g. Beers, Soccer, Classical Music, Rock Music) inherenly has its own visualization needs. So every specific brainlet may have a GUI different from the others, not only showing different part of the overall graph, but also giving different, context dependant, visualization facilities to the user. If I'm using a soccer brainlet I probabilty want to see a direct view on the "team members" when I select a soccer team, while navigating a movie brainlet I want to see the available video clips related. Of course there will be some basic facilities that are context independent and common to all the brainlets.

According to the Eclipse terminology, we will call every "window" in the GUI, a view.

The "Now focusing on" view specifies which resource the entire GUI is focusing on, helping users not to get lost in the graph navigation :-)

The GUED Navigator gives a tree-structured view on the local content. The roots of the tree represents the GUEDs used by the brainlet (e.g. Beers, Ingredients, etc...), in deeper levels we find subclasses and instances related to every "GUED root" ,according to the specific ontologies.
GUED NAvigator is a "Main Selecter", that is selecting an item in the navigator view cause the focus ("Now focusing on" view) to change ti the selected item.

Following screenshot deals with some particular views showing some specific annotation templates related to the focused resource. An annotation template is a set of annotations that are logically grouped, for example the "Commets view" shows every comment related to the selected respource, specifing the author and the insertion date.

It's important to notice that, as depicted in following picture, if you select a message in the comments view, the global focus does not change, so you can navigate trought the "Murphys" related comment without setting the brainlet focus to every particular comment you are reading.

The "Surrounding Triples" view provides a row graph navigation facility and it is not intended to be used by users non familiar with Semantic Web. Basically it shows all the relations in wich the selected resource is involved, no matter if it's the subject or object of such RDF statements.
Currently this view is used more for testing the application that to really use it, a more usable graph navigation view will be included in next releases.