Nearly there

I’ve been getting a few inquiries regarding YARS2, our federated RDF repository. It’s really cool to see interest from top-notch AI and scientific computing research institutes in the US and Germany, and from large companies in the pharmaceutical area.

Most of the people expect the system to be open source; currently YARS2 is closed source but we are rethinking that decision.

Although I consider YARS2 a stable product, and my main focus right now is to finish my Ph.D. thesis, we still incorporate optimisations into the YARS2 codebase, especially functionality required by the reasoning module and the faceted user interface.

It looks like everybody and their dog is writing faceted browsers these days.

Benjamin Nowack announced one a few days ago on the crunchbase mailing list, and David Huynh announced a “novel” way of browsing graph structured data based on sets on the swig mailing list.

Good that Michiel Hildebrand noted that set-based browsing existed before, in /facet and Eyal Oren’s work. Our own SWSE system, in fact, had set-based focus change in its first incarnation more than a year ago.

We removed that functionality for the current SWSE interface, because users didn’t seem to get what’s going on. But it looks like there’s some new design ideas to build an interaction model that is intuitive. Or we just have to be more picky about our users…