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Paper: ‘SAMP’ling Your Browser for the Semantic Web
Volume: 434, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIX
Page: 159
Authors: Derriere, S.; Boch, T.
Abstract: SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is one of the successes of the Virtual Observatory (VO). By allowing communication between various applications, it enables easy data sharing, and facilitates data exploration, taking advantage of each application’s functionalities. SAMP can also be used to allow web browsers to interact with the VO. We will show for instance how Firefox can be complemented with a plugin allowing the user to send messages from any web page to existing VO applications. But there is more to be done in the context of the Semantic Web. Semantic annotations can be included in web pages using microformats or RDFa (Resource Description Framework in attributes). We will demonstrate how to take advantage of this semantic markup using SAMP. Annotated web pages can be consumed by a browser plugin to build dedicated SAMP contextual messages (e.g. pointing an application to sky coordinates present in the web page). This mechanism provides a generic yet powerful way to interact between, for example, an astronomical web portal and other VO tools.
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