For the past week or so I was able to work with data.gov.uk to find a possibility to make use of government/public data for a nice sample gadget, that will work in the Gadget Server. However it is quite disappointing to see most of these data are in lengthy PDF files, and without some expensive processing these data could not be consumed easily. The happy scenarios in my mind was, that there will be a bunch of RESTfull web services where I can request for public data and in return I will get the result set in XML or (and if am really lucky) in JSON ;)

After some browsing over the data in the UK data site, There was one interesting area which is called SPARQL and that was my moment of joy :D. there were six government data endpoints which I can query against and the result set can be retrieved as XML or JSON. This was the ideal scenario, even the available data is limited, there it starts the story of the Semantic Web.

When I was reading for my bachelor’s thesis, under service orchestration and chirography, the concepts of semantic web (services) were discussed in length. However the idea is still in its early stages, and there is still no real business use-case for it. The very purpose of semantic web is that the resources of the WEB and there relationships can be self explained and explored.

Self Explainable RDF graph

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

The UK data site has offered chunks of eduction, transport, financial, environmental, analytical and statutory notices as RDF data endpoints which can be queried using SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language).

So why let this great opportunity to lay dry, my idea was simply to use these endpoints and query these data and display them in some gadgets, for instance with transport data we can draw traffic details in maps, or with financial and educational data we can create some graphs and charts.

But with some thought, WHY NOT go for mashing up, We have a great tool (WSO2 Mashup Server) just made for that. So I was cutting code for the past whole week to create a custom host object in the Mashup Server to query RDF (RDF Service endpoints or RDF Data sources) data, and am almost done, the host object is created, two mashup services are created (Query a RDF endpoint/and RDF data source) now its a matter of integrating the services with Google Maps API and visualize them as a gadget in the Gadget Server.

So yeah the good stuff will be in the next post. keep tuned :D

I had to blog about it ;)

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Today I got holidays. :D yeah I know some of you might be wondering whether am still schooling (Yeah I got the same feeling first lol) !!! !@#$%^& But yeah we got a super awesome two whole weeks to have some fun, go some where, anywhere out from checking mail, and doing the stuff we do day to day. Had the last-office-day party at flag and whistle dressed up like pirates, doing some crazy games and enjoying nice food. Dr. … Continue reading →

Yesterday (16th Dec) WSO2 Gadget Server graduated from its beta status and announced its release. WSO2 Gadget Server is designed to serve as a presentation middle-ware product in the SOA space to smoothly display chunks of service oriented data for the end users. The solution architecture is based on portal / portlet concept but making it far more simpler. Since the enterprises are more and more leaning towards the cloud and service oriented mashups, visualizing those data should not be … Continue reading →

We are about to release The long awaited WSO2 Gadget Server within few days of time. These few days I was doing some documentation and content writing about the Gadget Server, Apache Shindig and Google gadgets specification. My 1st article about authoring gadgets is now published on WSO2 Oxygen Tank as a help/Tutorial for Gadget server users. You can also download the Gadget Server release candidate 2 and play with it. Also Paul had written an interesting article about portals … Continue reading →

As I have mentioned in some previous post, today I did a talk about Apache shindig and its use cases (WSO2 Gadget Server) at Apache Con 09 with my Colleague Tyrell. So without writing about the whole talk let me share the presentation slides. The Talk turned up great, audience were quite interested, too bad we had very limited time and missed to do a demo. :( View more documents from Nuwan Bandara.

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Nothing much new to write, was busy with work, WSO2 Gadget Server is about to release in the coming weeks, (I’ll be writing a whole story about it in a coming post). Apart from all those, my first article was published today in the diGIT magazine, which is a free online IT magazine run by a bunch of Sri Lankans. For some time I wanted to write about SOA and my findings in my final academic year, I thought I … Continue reading →