IsaViz: A Visual Authoring Tool for RDF

Current version: 2.1 (October 2004)

Introduction

IsaViz is a visual environment for browsing and authoring RDF models represented as graphs. It features:

a 2.5D user interface allowing smooth zooming and navigation in the graph
creation and editing of graphs by drawing ellipses, boxes and arcs
RDF/XML, Notation 3 and N-Triple import
RDF/XML, Notation 3 and N-Triple export, but also SVG and PNG export

Since version 2.0, IsaViz can render RDF graphs using GSS (Graph Stylesheets), a stylesheet language derived from CSS and SVG for styling RDF models represented as node-link diagrams.

IsaViz 2 with support for GSS (click to enlarge)

News

Latest builds available (2005-02-11)

In order to make bug fixes and improvements publicly available as quickly as possible, a build of the latest source code can now be downloaded thanks to INRIA. See changes for a complete list of new features and improvements.

IsaViz 2.1 released (2004-10-20)

This new relase is based on Jena 2.1 and supports the revised W3C RDF/XML Syntax Specification issued by the RDF Core Working Group. This version should also be easier to use in a Mac OS X environment. See changes for a complete list of new features and improvements.

OWL Schema for GSS (2003-08-12)

Ryan Lee has written an OWL schema for GSS, which can be found at the GSS namespace URI. An informal Notation 3 version is also available.

Problem with GraphViz 1.10.0 (2003-07-31)

The first release of GraphViz version 1.10.0 contains a bug that causes dot to produce incomplete SVG files, thus preventing IsaViz from importing RDF files. This problem has been corrected in subsequent releases, which can be downloaded from the graphviz.org site. Note: this problem only affects users who have installed GraphViz version 1.10.0.

Screenshots


More screenshots are available.

Download

Latest stable version: 2.1

Binary distribution (zip file, 9.46 Mb)	isaviz-bin-2_1.zip
Binary distribution (tarball, 9.42 Mb)	isaviz-bin-2_1.tar.gz
Source distribution (tarball, 9.98 Mb)	isaviz-src-2_1.tar.gz
Older versions

Note: if you are using a download software agent like GetRight and are prompted for a password when requesting one of the above files, try disabling this software.

Development version: the latest source code is available through the W3C’s public CVS repository.

Other Required Libraries

You will also need to download graphviz/dot for your specific platform (version 1.8.9 or later is mandatory if you are installing IsaViz 2). Note: some instances of version 1.10.0 had a bug that produced incomplete SVG files, but it has been corrected in subsequent releases (newer versions can be obtained on the graphviz.org site).

Finally, as IsaViz is implemented in Java, it requires a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) 1.3.0 or later (1.4.0 or later strongly recommended - see Known problems) since the GUI makes extensive use of Java2D which featured poor performances in JVM 1.2.x. The latest JVM from Sun can be downloaded at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/

Plug-Ins

The Sesame plug-in makes it possible to read/write RDF data directly from/to a Sesame server. It can be downloaded freely from the Sesame Sourceforge Project page.

Documentation

Installation instructions contain information on how to install and configure IsaViz, including requirements for additional software versions. You should read these as they contain important instructions regarding GraphViz/dot which is not included in the distribution.

A User Manual describing all features of IsaViz is also available, as well as a User Manual for Graph Stylesheets (GSS).

Mailing List

If you want to make comments, bug reports or simply ask a question, use the following mailing list: www-isaviz@w3.org. To subscribe to the list, send an e-mail to www-isaviz-request@w3.org with subscribe in the subject header. See http://www.w3.org/Mail/Request for more details. An archive of messages sent to the list is available.

Known Problems

When using a JVM 1.3.x to run IsaViz, it may randomly freeze for no apparent reason. This problem seems to occur especially on slow systems (no matter the OS) and on all UNIX/Linux systems. It is somehow related to the Java2D drawString method when combined with affine transformations (used by the ZVTM to draw text in the zoomable window). It seems to have been fixed in JVM 1.4.0, so I suggest that people encountering this problem run IsaViz using a JVM 1.4.0 or later (it should completely disappear).
Due to a bug in GraphViz's SVG output, IsaViz is not able to fully load RDF models containing ampersand characters ('&') in literal values. The bug was reported against GraphViz version 1.7.6 and has been fixed in version 1.8.1 (it is still present in version 1.7.12). The corresponding error message looks like this: The parsing might not be complete (The file is probably not well-formed XML). Some nodes and edges might be missing from the graph because of an error (check error log) in file C:\Temp\isv20013.svg. You can get a more complete error report by reading the error log.
The ZVTM uses a mouse cursor different from the system cursor, tightly coupled to ZVTM views and thus dependant on their refresh rate. It can therefore be difficult to control the mouse when browsing/editing big models. This difficult problem was addressed at the ZVTM level by implementing a specific XOR mode. This mode is available since version 0.8.0 of the library, which ships with IsaViz v1.1 and subsequent releases.

Acknowledgements

IsaViz is developed by Emmanuel Pietriga.

The first version was developed in collaboration with Xerox Research Centre Europe which also contributed XVTM, the ancestor of ZVTM (Zoomable Visual Transformation Machine) upon which IsaViz is built. IsaViz 2.0/GSS was developed during my postdoc funded by INRIA and MIT. As of October 2004, further development is handled by INRIA Futurs project In Situ. IsaViz also includes software developed by:

and makes use of the GraphViz library developed by AT&T Research.

The Sesame plug-in is developed by Aduna.

Emmanuel Pietriga
Last modified: Tue Mar 1 16:28:38 CET 2005