Using RDF data to add value to a page

I am a regular reader of the Blog written by Tony Hirst at the Open University. He’s always looking for existing tools which can solve new problems. I think my thing is looking for little tools which don’t exist but should.

I’ve had an idea for a while that it would be cool to use RDF to add data into a webpage, but there’s no easy way to do it. So what I’ve done is a combination of a web service and a javascript library.

Here’s how to use it to take a URI of a location with a geo:lat and geo:long and embed a map in your webpage:

 <script src='injectgeo.js' type='text/javascript' ></script>

 <div id='mymap'></div>
 <script type='text/javascript'>
 injectGeo('http://dbpedia.org/resource/Brading','mymap');
 </script>

It would be only a little extra work to start using linked data goodness in the mix.

• See it in action!

Images in Linked Data

One interesting problem with the above page is the picture of TimBL is bloody huge. We don’t include size information in the FOAF data so it’s not possible to pick which size to show. Where last week I said we should aim to always include an rdf:type and one of the normal label attributes (dc:title, foaf:name, rdf:label etc.). I think I’m going to suggest that images should have a width and height. Anyone know some good predicates for that?