Sweet Tools: SWC cooperates with Mike Bergman

Good news: As of today, we have a mirror of the Sweet Tools collection running on our website! You have probably come across Mike Bergman‘s Sweet Tools collection before: With Sweet Tools, Mike aims to provide a comprehensive, up-to date list of semantic web tools and applications, both open source and commercial, arranged into categories reflecting their place and function in the overall architecture of the web. I first stumbled upon Sweet Tools about a year ago, and found it extremely useful – and was also pleased to find my own development, Leeet, featured in the list.

So I wrote an email to Mike, asking whether it would be possible to mirror the Sweet Tools collection on our website, aiming to further its use and awareness of the scope of available tools in Europe. Gladly, Mike was more than open to the idea; he writes that my “outreach was timely since the listing itself was growing to a point of not being easily maintained by a single individual, plus reducing possible conflicts of interest due to my new position with Zitgist.”

Tonight the results of our collaboration went live: a Sweet Tools mirror based on Exhibit 2-0. Exhibit is a data integration and visualization framework developed by David Huynh at MIT, allowing for the integration of data “without ever touching a database or a web server, or doing any programming” (that’s David’s own description of Exhibit, and even though it might sound ‘too good to be true’, it ‘s completely accurate). Check it out here!

Of course the collaboration is not going to be confined to the mirror, we are also going to contribute to the collection, hoping to eventually turn Sweet Tools into a repository that is maintained by a community of Semantic Web aficionados.