Review: SemanticWorks 2006

Altova SemanticWorks 2006, $249
Altova
Beverly, Massachusetts
(978) 816-1600
http://www.altova.com/products_semanticworks.html

Lots of people have been talking about the semantic Web for years, but it's been at least moderately difficult to do anything about it. Some of the high-powered thinkers at the W3C have come up with a set of standards including RDF and OWL for defining structured metadata on the Web. Because these languages are XML dialects, you can write RDF and OWL documents in any decent XML editor. But for that matter, you can write them in NotePad. That doesn't mean it's a pleasant experience to try. There are a fair number of fussy little rules to follow in generating valid RDF and OWL documents, and if you have to concentrate on remembering these yourself, it's tough to get the job done.

What SemanticWorks brings to the table is an editor specifically tuned for semantic Web documents, including RDF, RDFS, OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. While you can get into any of these file types in a text view that shows you the actual XML (with a user interface that will be familiar to anyone who has used Altova's XMLSpy editor), you're much more likely to work in the drag-and-drop, menu-driven view that constrains you to valid operations. Here you get a much more schematic view of what's going on, and you build documents by selecting from shortcut menus and choosing operations like "create new instance" or "toggle functional property." SemanticWorks will not teach you everything you need to know about writing documents for the semantic Web (indeed, the help file assumes you already have a pretty strong grasp of why you want to turn out these documents) but it does its best to make sure the end product of your efforts really is valid. Syntax and semantic checking is offered at every step of the way, which is another big help. An hour or so spent with the tutorials should be enough to get anyone who understands the basics of RDF and OWL pointed in the right direction and feeling comfortable with using SemanticWorks to turn out their own documents and ontologies.

So far there's been a chicken-and-egg problem about this semantic Web stuff: there isn't much of it out there in part because there are few tools, and there are few tools in part because there aren't many files for the tools to work with (the Swoogle search engine may help you find some files to play with if you're interested). SemanticWorks may help move the process along a bit, by making it possible for more developers and designers to focus on why they want these documents instead of needing to worry quite so much about the mechanics of turning them out. You still need to come up with your own justification for using the product (Altova's own "What is the Semantic Web?" page will get you started), but if you can do that, you'll find this infinitely easier than trying to build RDF and OWL documents with a standard XML editor.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Published October 12, 2005