Using Operator with RDFa for Chemistry
What can I say…this post has everything.
First, it shows how Egon has used RDFa to mark-up HTML documents with information about molecules–something he started doing last year. But then it shows how he uses the latest version of Operator (0.8) to parse the RDFa, and generate menus which will search chemistry databases.
What’s most interesting about this post for me, is that Egon actually went through the process of doing all of this by using a GreaseMonkey script first, before he then used Operator to do the heavy lifting. GreaseMonkey is great for general purpose processing on a page, but the important thing about extensions like Operator is that they deal with your page at the semantic level. It then makes it very easy to do the type of thing that Egon has done, and add a menu item that searches a specific database. By talking us through the ‘long-hand’ technique we start to see the real benefits of Operator.
I’m looking forward to the next instalment, because I think Egon’s on a roll here!