Turn RDF instances of well-know SHACL/Shex shapes into a nice HTML layout

[phochste]

Pitch

A user has a Pod on which she stores data that fits particular shapes BookReviewShape , CVShape , RecipeShape. She wants to choose from a market of layout styles that can render these shapes according to her preferences.

For instance for her Curriculum Vitae related data on her Pod she is quite picky in what form it is rendered. The CVShape expresses what is part of a typical CV. These shape could have gotten some popularity which allows many applications to provide renderers for it.

Desired solution

• The solution builds on top of published data shapes that have gained some popularity.
  • There are other applications in the toolchain of the user that can produce that that fits this shape (see for example 19 and 65
• The solution has the capabilities to render data from this shape
• The solution provides some user controls to change the specifics of the rendering (e.g. provides some HTML templates)

Acceptance criteria

• Publish a SHACL/Shex sample data shape for a BookReview or Recipe. (Use e.g. GoodReads or AllRecipes.com as inspiration)
• Create a JS <script> that can be included in any HTML page that gets as input:
  • the path to a data instance of the shape (e.g. a link to an RDF resource of the BookReview shape)
  • a DOM element to drop the layout in
  • E.g bookShapeRender('http://mypod.org/review/review1.ttl', myDivElement)
• As output the script should generate a pleasant layout of a BookReview for the input data
• Create several version of rendered HTML layouts for the same shape

Pointers

• https://github.com/SolidLabResearch/Challenges/issues/90

Scenarios

• https://github.com/SolidLabResearch/Challenges/issues/76

[pheyvaer]

choose from a market of applications that can render these shapes

Can we replace "applications" with something like library/JS snippet because from the text I understand that this is not a full-blown application, right?

The are other applications in the toolchain of the user that can produce that that fits this shape

Isn't this already resolved with your work about forms (#19)?

The solution has the capabilities to render data from this shape of transform data to this shape

Why is there the need to transform data to this shape? Specifically, how does it contribute to this challenge?

(e.g. a link to a Turtle resource of the BookReview shape)

All demos should support all RDF serializations. We have Comunica to deal with that.

Create several version of JS layouts for the same shape

What does this mean concretely? Different HTML layouts?

Overall comment: is this an alternative to the form viewer? Where the viewer is a full-blown application, while this challenge allows users to add the view component in their existing applications?

[phochste]

@pheyvaer I've updated the text. This is not an alternative to the form viewer. A form viewer can render any kind of RDF form description into a Web form. This application does render a very specific shape into a nice pleasant HTML layout for endusers.

E.g. I would like to see a CV-shape become popular and have a market of HTML plugins I can use to render CV-shapes in a pleasing way. This resembles a bit how Wordpress has a market for Wordpress shaped data.

How the data of the CV-shape is produced, that is not part of the challenge. Other tools can do that.

[pheyvaer]

A form viewer can render any kind of RDF form description into a Web form.

Isn't that the form render that does that?

This application does render a very specific shape into a nice pleasant HTML layout for endusers.

Which application do you mean here?

[phochste]

This is not an alternative to the form render. A form renderer can render any kind of RDF form description into a Web form. However, the solution I seek in this issue does render a very specific shape into a nice pleasant HTML layout for endusers.

[pheyvaer]

I also don't say it's an alternative. But you say that the form viewer "renders a form description in a Web form" and now you say that a form renderer "renders a form description in a Web form". We just have to make sure that the terminology we use is consistent.

[phochste]

Oh I thought you were referring to having a preference for naming applications. I guess we already agreed that form viewer was a bad name and form renderer is a better one. Alas, I already named my form renderer project FormViewer. But @smessie used our preferred name for his formrenderer project.