[developers] Web interfaces

[Stephan Oepen]

hi alexandre,

i developed the visualizations in the LOGON on-line demonstrator (e.g.
http://erg.delph-in.net) in 2002, hence they are pure dynamic HTML before
SVG became generally available.  the HTML generation is part of the lisp
code of the LKB and [incr tsdb()].

i am not sure there is much to learn here, in part because i personally
consider some of the visualization choices out of date: for MRS, i have
come to consider the AVM-like rendering misleading and today would advocate
a more compact format, as we use in the ERG Semantic Documentation (e.g.
http://moin.delph-in.net/wiki/ErgSemantics/Essence).  for EDS, i would
nowadays favor a graphical rendering over the textual one, e.g. via the DOT
layout engine, as implemented in mtool (e.g.
http://mrp.nlpl.eu/2020/index.php?page=12).

only for DM, i am still fairly happy with the visualization used on the
LOGON demonsrator for the ERG.  this is rendered client-side, using an
extension of the Brat JavaScript library to support the SDP 2015 tabular
format.  however, for DM we currently lack a conversion path outside [incr
tsdb()], and even what is there has hardly been maintained since angelina
ivanova developed the original converter in 2014. or so.

visualization in the WSI web application, in turn, was developed by milen
kouylekov, in part as a mimicry of the HTML renderings from LOGON.  in some
cases, i believe, the rendering is done in the client (in JavaScript), e.g.
for the SDP graphs (including DM) and probably EDS.  for MRS, i believe
milen may actually pre-compute the HTML on the server, in which case this
would be part of the WSI Java code base.  again, i am not sure it will pay
off to try and re-use much of these parts.

i generally buy into the delphin-viz philosophy: communicate various types
of representations in JSON and do the rendering in JavaScript on the
client, with liberal use of SVG.  i believe further development in this
paradigm has the highest potential for reuse.  however, it may limit layout
sophistication: for various types of semantic graphs, i have grown very
fond of the DOT language and GraphViz rendering engines.  last i checked
there were multiple initiatives to support that framework for in-browser
rendering, but none appeared to be reasonably mature yet.

finally, in the WSI context you will ultimately want more than just the
visualization of an object: in my use of the service, i have found it
essential to highlight the parts of the structure matched by a given query,
e.g. MRS variables, predicates, roles, etc.  i am pretty sure milen applies
the color-highlighting in the client, e.g. when toggling between multiple
possible matches, based on (sets of) a list of sub-structure identifiers
that match constituents of the query.  to do this, the query processor
(server) and renderer (client) need a common scheme of referring to
sub-structures.

best wishes, oe


On Fri, 7 May 2021 at 03:46 Alexandre Rademaker <arademaker at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I want to understand the alternatives we have for presenting semantic and
> syntactic structures on a web page. This is part of our current effort to
> rewrite the WSI interface. The goal is to have something similar to the
> last version of WSI that I had access and I have it running with sample
> data at https://wsi.mybluemix.net/demo/.
>
> This instance has MRS and EDS. I could not import DMRS, but I remember
> that I saw somewhere another instance of WSI exposing DMRS. Does anyone
> know where?
>
> Anyway, we already have a new WQL to SPARQL transformation in place, and
> now we are moving to the web interface part. The WSI code is quite
> complicated using a lot of javascript. I could not understand how the
> EDS/MRSs are transmitted from the Jean to the browser.
>
> But even if I ignore that and design a new strategy, I would like to reuse
> the alternatives available to present MRS, DMRS, and EDS in the browser.
> Besides the WSI interface, we have:
>
> 1. http://chimpanzee.ling.washington.edu/demophin/erg/parse displays only
> DMRS. Who is the author of the dmrs.js? The DMRSs are transformed into SVG…
>
> 2. http://delph-in.github.io/delphin-viz/demo/. It shows derivation
> trees, MRS and DRMSs. Uses https://github.com/delph-in/delphin-viz, it is
> the state-of-the-art solution for displaying DELPH-IN structures? I didn't
> find documentation; how should my backend provide the data to allow this
> code to load/parse and display them on a page?
>
> 3. http://erg.delph-in.net/logon. It shows trees (not the same as above),
> dm, MRS, EDS. The DM is not the DMRS… The tree, EDS, and MRS are HTML
> tables produced on the server-side by some code; the DM is transformed in
> SVG, but how? The backend is Lisp. I would love to understand all the
> loading steps of the logon scripts! I suppose it is using LKB with the ERG
> 1214, but the www bash script is almost impossible to read... anyway, for
> WSI, I don't need to call a parser but to retrieve the structures from an
> RDF triplestore and display them.
>
> Does anyone have any direction? It would help me a lot!
>
> Best,
> Alexandre
>
>
>
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