Uche gave an excellent suggestion to augment Emeka to work with Triclops. After finishing Triclops, I had realized that most of the functionality Emeka provided was now redundant since it could be performed using Triclops (with the added advantage of being able to diagram/navigate RDF Graphs). Triclops URIs are unfortunately very long for queries submitted through HTTP GET. This is unfortunately unavoidable mostly because the parameters to the query service are Versa queries (which have their own syntax that includes characters that may not be very friendly for URIs) and URIs, so the prospect of submitting URIs to a service identified to a URI will probably always be problematic and might be as fundamental as submitting XML content through an XML-based messaging format. I'm digressing, but the solution that worked for me (which Uche suggested) was to make use of a URI 'shortening' service (such as MakeAShorterLink - which I used) to generate a 'hashed' or 'compacted' form of the URI from the parts submitted from , say, IRC. For example, lets say I was interested in Daniel Krech's redfoot framework and wanted to navigate the ontology (available from the URL: http://redfoot.net/2005/redfoot) as an RDF diagram in order to get an idea of the components and how they related. In particular, lets say I knew to start with the redfoot:Code class, I could interactively ask Emeka to return to execute the query:
redfoot:Code
against the URL which returns the RDF/XML serialization of the redfoot ontology. I could also ask Emeka to have the result rendered as a JPEG diagram with an associated image map that allows me to navigate to other aspects of the ontology to learn more about redfoot. Below is how I would do so with the new .triclops service:
<chimezie> .triclops "redfoot:Code" http://redfoot.net/2005/redfoot jpeg <Emeka> Shortened link to Triclops request: http://makeashorterlink.com/?I1F7262EB
Below is the help associated with the triclops service.
<chimezie> .help triclops <Emeka> .triclops "..Versa Query.." <source graph> <triples|jpeg|svg|versa> <Emeka> The first argument is quoted Versa query to execute. The second is a URL which points to the RDF graph (N3 or RDF/XML) to query against <Emeka> The third argument is one of "triples", "jpeg", or "svg" and specifies how to return the query result <Emeka> "triples" - raw triples in a tabled-grid, "jpeg" or "svg" - as navigable RDF graphs, and "versa" - raw Versa datatypes (rendered as html) <Emeka> The result is a uri (courtesy of http://makeashorterlink.com) which redirects to the appropriate Triclops request