The loomp Technology

Here we provide a brief overview of the concepts and technologies behind loomp. Basically loomp makes use of XHTML, RDFa and the Linked Data principles to provide a multi-layered content network.

loomp Server and API

loomp is not only an RDFa editor (that is what we call the OCA, see brief introduction below) but a content model and a server API. The content model degenerates a conventional document into atomic parts that represent the smallest entities an author wants to delimit (paragraphs, sentences, words,...). In the end a document consists of a mashup of several semantically annotated elements (by now only text elements). Elements can appear in multiple documents. The whole content network is stored as an RDF graph in a triple store. Thus loomp creates one content network that consists of documents which are interlinked because of the elements they share and a second content network which is based on annotations that are shared by elements or documents. The RDF graph may also be served separately via a Linked Data endpoint.

One Click Annotation

With the One Click Annotator (OCA) we aim at providing tool support for annotating content semantically in an intuitive way. We consider non-experts having little or no knowledge of semantic technologies as the primary target group which are familiar with conventional work processors. To realize an adequate interface, the OCA uses well-known components of existing user interfaces, such as the ribbon toolbar, and aims at replacing the process of highlighting things bold, italic or underlined. It is implemented as a component that can be integrated into Web applications, e.g. a wiki.