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BrownSauce RDF Browser

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Installation

Download BrownSauce from the link above. The '14' versions are for Java 1.4, the '12' versions for previous versions. Expand the file, which should result in a directory named 'brownsauceNN-N.N'. Installation is complete.

Running BrownSauce

BrownSauce runs as a local http server. It is a java web application, so you can add it to a preexisting server like Tomcat or Jetty. However the simplest thing to do is as follows:
  1. cd to the brownsauce directory. (Apologies to Windows users, dir for you).
  2. Unix: sh run.sh should start BrownSauce running.
  3. Windows: Make sure the current directory, plus all the jar files in the 'lib' directory, are in your classpath. java MiniServer should start BrownSauce. (Volunteers to write a windows equivalent of run.sh?)
  4. Point you browser to: http://localhost:8080/brownsauce/.
  5. That should be all

Using BrownSauce

To use BrownSauce you need a place to start (a source, and RDF/XML document) and a thing to look at from that source. You can specify these in two ways:
  1. Using a source URI and a resource URI.
  2. Using a source URI and a thing identified using a property and attribute. For example http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/mbox, mailto:pldms@mac.com might pick me out of a source. BrownSauce has a default which picks out a person from a foaf file.

Once started you can browse around the semantic web. Here is a place to start. Note that you can follow seeAlso links.

Warning: BrownSauce uses schemas. Currently xmlns.com is unavailable. You can fix this by making xmlns.com point to 80.192.1.64 in your hosts file.

Customising BrownSauce

BrownSauce can be customised in two ways. Firstly you can use webapps/brownsauce/WEB-INF/custom.rdf to change some of the 'coarse graining', plus augment schemas. Secondy there is webapps/brownsauce/bs.css for styling the display.