Fenfire can be currently used to browse and edit data in RDF documents. You can look inside RDF files, follow links to Semantic Web resources (in RDF/XML or Turtle format), change information locally and author new content. Fenfire supports RDF/XML and Turtle file formats.
Ask us for a prepackaged snapshot version of Fenfire, or follow the Getting started notes meant for developers for now.
Start a Fenfire snapshot with java -jar snapshot.jar some-rdf-file or one that you compiled yourself with ( cd fenfire && make run FILE="some-rdf-file"). In case of XML files, please prepend "-xml ". You should see the browser starting at some item from the file, and a list of properties connected to that node.
Keyboard navigation works by first selecting a property with up and down arrow keys and then following an inverse property left with the left arrow key or a positive property right with the right arrow key.
Mouse navigation works by left-clicking any node you want to browse to. If there are more properties than fit the window you can scroll down by clicking some property line at the bottom to focus it.
In addition to the default PropertyListView, there can be other views that are able to show surroundings of the current node. In that case, the right sidebar will list these views and allow you to switch to them with a mouse click or with a keyboard shortcut (given at the bottom of the left sidebar).
At the bottom of the left sidebar, there is a keyboard shortcut to load RDF data from the web. For this to work, the data must be available from the http URI of the current node or of a node that is linked to the current node as an rdfs:seeAlso property. There are some suitable starting points in demo data that is shown if you don't specify a file name on startup.
For instance, you can navigate to a node that says "Danny's FOAF file" on it. If you now try to load RDF data from the web, you should get new links that lead to Daniel Ayers's Friend-of-a-Friend Semantic Web information. This information contains pointers to more resources that you can load in the same way.
Another example node says "CaptSolo's blog" on it. This resource is in HTML but an rdfs:seeAlso is included to an RSS feed of the same information. If you choose to load RDF data, the weblog feed is displayed and you can read the entries.
A third example is "Fenfire project" and for that there is Description-of-a-Project (DOAP) information available.
If you want to try a resource of your own, you can do that by applying shortcuts "go to [node]" and "a node given by URI". The latter then asks you to provide the URI your resource has information on. If the URI to fetch the data is different, you can add an rdfs:seeAlso property like there was for the weblog example.
Whenever Fenfire is running, there is some RDF file it considers primary and suitable for saves. If you gave file names on startup, the first of those is taken. Otherwise, a temporary file name has been designated. Whenever you apply the shortcut to save the graph, this file is saved with any changes you've made. Even if you've made changes to information that has been loaded from the web, these changes are saved to this one and same file.
Whenever a literal property is selected, it can be edited with normal keys: arrow keys left and right, backspace, letters, numbers etc. If the text on a node is derived from this literal, it changes at the same time.
To add a new property, use the keyboard shortcuts to "connect on [prop] to [node]" or "connect backwards on [prop] to [node]". After this, you should select a property from the list on the left sidebar by pressing down Alt and typing the three-letter shortcut given in parentheses after the property name. The last step is to select the node: To create a new resource, use "a new node". To create a new literal, use "a new literal". To use an existing node, browse to that node and use "this node". You can also type the URI with "a node given by URI".
To remove properties, there are shortcuts similar to following links that break a link instead.
If you start with a new or empty file, Fenfire will create two nodes for you to begin with. One of them is an initially empty "home" or "start" node for you, the other represents the file itself and is used to declare the start node, but can also be used to give any other metadata about the document. You can use the editing features described in the previous section to create new content.
One possible way to proceed is to connect a few new nodes to the start node with the general sl:structLink property. You can put text on them with any text property such as the general rdfs:label. Later, you can describe connections between the nodes and use more specific properties if applicable.
Properties that are not on the list yet can be entered with the shortcut "a node given by URI" for the first time. You can also create new properties as new nodes and start to use them as properties with help of the shortcut "this node".
We don't yet provide any special support for schemas or ontologies, although you can browse them in RDF format. Considering namespaces, Fenfire comes with a set of predefined ones and also utilises any namespaces in the loaded files. If you save a file and would like it to use additional namespace shorthands, you can edit the definitions in using some other tool and Fenfire will honour them after that.