Thursday, September 1, 2011

Abiword RDF Drag and Drop

Now that abiword has low level RDF support I thought I'd make it simpler to get some data into the document's RDF. The initial support lets you drag contact and calendar entries from Evolution into your document as shown below. Notice that a new RDF Link is created for you and when you choose to right click that link and "Show RDF" there are many RDF triples that have been created by the D&D action.

Abiword RDF Drag and Drop from Ben Martin on Vimeo.


I think these sort of user interface additions help to make using RDF quick and easy, even for those who don't know or care what it is and where it gets stored in the document. Abiword can load and save RDF in both it's native abw files and ODF formats. You can of course convert between both without loosing the RDF ;)

I plan to add D&D in the other direction later on, so you can pickup a person from a document or an event. Similar to how many email clients let you import ics calendar files into your local Calendar. Having RDF in ODF lets you share content, style, and semantics, all in a truly open format single file.

Oh, and the code should hit svn trunk real soon now.

3 comments:

Kevin Krammer said...

Does the drag source have to provide the data in RDF already or just some data type specific standard format? I.e. is Evolution in this case providing contacts as vCard and calendar entries a iCal?

monkeyiq said...

vcard and ical format are fine & what are used, the evolution is not patched at all. More specifically if the mimetypes are text/x-vcard or text/calendar then you should be able to plomp that data into the document just as in the video.

BENNY WIRAATMAJA said...

I think so too ... seems better