It’s Time to Become an EXHIBITionist!

MIT’s Exhibit Continues the Simile Project’s Long String of Innovative Tools

I have just come across a new innovative Web development, and its simplicity and elegance have literally taken my breath away! Exhibit, from the Simile project at MIT and its lead author David Huynh, whose contributions include the stellar Piggy Bank (semantic Web Firefox extension), Sifter (little known, but excellent automatic Web data extractor), Babel (data format translator), Timeline (Javascript timeline creator), Ajax (toolset), Solvent (Web data extractor used by Piggy Bank) and Longwell (web-based RDF-powered faceted browser). David is the lead author on the first five tools listed. As a Ph.D. student at MIT, David is truly becoming one of the leading lights in practical semantic Web tool development. Exhibit only reinforces that reputation.

According to its Web site:

Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.

It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them. . . .

“No Database, No Web Application” means that you can create your own exhibits using just a text editor. . . It’s quite easy to make exhibits. We even let you copy data straight out of a boring spreadsheet and convert it into an exhibit automatically. . . .

Exhibit consists of a bunch of Javascript files that you include in your web page. At load time, this Javascript code reads in one or more JSON data files that you link from within your web page and constructs a database implemented in Javascript right inside the browser of whoever visits your web page. It then dynamically re-constructs the web page as the visitor sorts and filters through the data. . . .

The advantages of Exhibit are as follows:

• No traditional database technology involved even though Exhibit-embedding web pages appear as if they are backed by databases. So you don’t have to design any database, configure it, and maintain it. After all, if you only have a few dozens of things to publish rather than thousands, why would you spend so much effort in dealing with database technologies?
• No server-side code required even though Exhibit-embedding web pages are heavily templated. So, there is no need to learn ASP, PHP, JSP, CGI, Velocity, etc. There is no need to worry which server-side scripting technology your hosting provider supports.
• No need for web server if you only want to create exhibits and keep them on your own computer for your own use. They work straight from the file system.

We also provide a complementary service called Babel that lets you convert data from various sources, including tab-separated values (copied straight from spreadsheets) and Bibtex files, into formats that Exhibit understands.

The Exhibit Web site offers a growing list of helpful tutorials and some live examples of database-related “exhibits,” one of which is this U.S. Presidents’ example that shows maps, timelines, thumbnails and other nifty displays (see the actual site for the interactive displays):

You can get Exhibit today and embed it in your own Web site (more on this to come!).

To learn more about the background to this project, please see the submitted paper, Exhibit: Lightweight Structured Data Publishing, submitted to WWW, 2007, by David Huynh, Robert Miller, and David Karger.

Gentlemen, on behalf of the community, let me say, “Thanks! Most excellent work!” It’s discoveries like these that make the Internet so worthwhile.