As we blogged last month, we have been putting together a portal inferface tool that allows us to take a collection of RDF, in our case descriptions of environmental organizations, and render it in a faceted browser. This is working well and enabled us to demonstrate a prototype successfully to Anthony Perret of the environment council at a recent meeting.
The dimensions to use to drive the browsing are described in the form of either RDFS class hiearchies or SKOS thesauri. It proved to be quite easy to use Jena's rule processing engine to add rules to propagate the transitive closure of the SKOS term lattice along with basic RDFS processing and a little OWL support (we needed inverse properties). In the portal description (in RDF of course) you can just specify a set of data sources and ontologies, together with what rule file you want to use for processing. Surprisingly simple rules have been enough to implement the functionality needed for the demo so far.
We've also been able to connect the two tools together. For an internal demonstration we were able to capture and classify some information snippets in a semblog and view them in the appropriate categories in a portal along with some preclassified documents. What makes it really fun is that the classification scheme itself, since it's expressed in RDF, is just another object you can browse and manipulate. So you can link in another data source, which uses a different classification scheme, and can see that scheme as another dimension available for use in browsing.