SWA – SPARQL Web Applications

TopBraid technology enables a new generation of web front ends. These applications have a small, generic core architecture that is ready to work with any type of data, while specific behaviors are brought in from web ontologies.

SWP makes it easy to encapsulate HTML snippets into reusable components. These components can be embedded into other HTML snippets as new XML/HTML tags. Applications are assembled from a growing SWP Application Component Library with pre-built trees, forms, grids components as well as more sophisticated visualizations.

You do not need to develop your whole application with SWP to reuse these components. You can pick your favorite framework such as PHP or any JavaScript framework, for the surrounding page. Simply use the SWP components where they make sense. For example, you may need a SKOS Concept tree to drive the navigation of your application – embed an swa:TreeGadget. Or you may want to expose semantic search over your content – embed an swa:FormSearchGadget. Here is a screenshot of “normal” HTML page that includes SWA gadgets loaded from a TopBraid Live server:

SWA is supported by all TopBraid products. SWA components can be easily customized with CSS stylesheets. Experienced HTML developers can create and publish new components. To view help pages for SWA with embedded working examples, follow these steps:

1. Download TBC-ME here
2. Start TBC-ME
3. Open HELP menu and select SWA Help/Examples

This document has the following sections describing the following key concepts of SWA:

1. Application Architecture and Layout introduces how SWA applications are constructed from the ground up: a typical solution defines a top-level user-defined SWP element that uses swa:FullScreenBorderLayout to organize the screen into resizable panels. Those panels may be re-loaded by means of the ui:loadable control element, and JavaScript events may trigger reloading. For example, a click on a tree may reload the form. The SWA Gadgets framework makes working with such reloadable windows very easy.
2. Forms describes how forms can be used and customized for individual ontologies. Forms are collections of swa:Objects elements, arranged in an HTML layout. Forms may be customized in many ways, and new types of widgets can be added.
3. Grids and Search Results shows how to display tabular data, especially to explore search results. SWA has a built-in mechanism that turns HTML search forms into SPARQL queries, and the results of those queries are then displayed in an interactive grid.
4. Trees introduces the use of tree structures to navigate through hierarchical data. Finally, there are miscellaneous other SWA elements that are described in Section 6: Other SWA Components.

TBC-ME includes templates for building SWA applications. To use one of the templates right-click on a project you want to place the application in and select from the menu New then SWA Application based on Template. This will create and open a new application with all component assets copied from the selected template. To open your application in a browser use: http://localhost:8083/tbl/swp?_viewClass=”place here URI of the Application class from your new application”&_withImports=true&_base=”place here URI of the graph you want to test your application with”.

While you can begin developing applications by reading through the technical materials listed on this site and consulting the Help facility in TopBraid Composer, for best results we recommend taking TopBraid Platform and Tools training.