Semantic Web at Opera

People ask from time to time what you can do with widgets. Although you can make a "Hello world" widget (the instructions fit on a business card) it seems that this is a little simplistic for most people. Instead they make a clock widget.

Beautiful as some of these are (mine, for example ) they are not in themselves the thing the world needed most. But every so often something comes along that has real value. I think the first semweb widget was Jibberjim's Widgnaut, a widget version of foafnaut that crawled My.Opera's FOAF data. (Since we added the possibility to link your My.Opera FOAF to external files, it isn't a walled garden, just a starting point. Kjetil++! ).

Today we released a new widget - the tabulator widget version of Tim Berners-Lee's tabulator, which is a generic RDF browser. This means that now available for your delectation, an RDF browser running in Opera. I'm waiting to see how it works when widgets are released on mobile browsers, but please, get Opera 9 (or 9.01) if you haven't already, download the widget, and give it a try.

Many thanks to David Håsäther who did the widgetising and debugging to make it work cross-platform, Tim and all the folks who have worked on the tabulator project, JibberJim for building the RDF parser in the first place (way back when) and Gorm for making that work in Opera too.

I'd like to point out that Jim Ley, an SVG and Semantic Web guru, has created a widget called Widgnaut. It can be used to explore the social networks of the Opera Community, by clicking on people. It works similarly to FOAFNaut, by the same author.