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Friday, April 25, 2003
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"Information architecture is an area that promises to be transformed by our evolving thinking about social software. Clearly, we need to look at the users, content and context of any project in the light of our social network research. â01CSites donâ019t exist in a vacuum,â01D as IA guru Louis Rosenfeld says, â01Cbut in a broader information ecology made up of content, tools, people, roles, interactions, policies, barriers, etc.â01D However, the potential for innovation in this area goes way beyond this
There has always been debate about the usefulness of metadata and shared standards in the real world, but social software has the potential for something much more exciting: multiple sources of collaborative, emergent metadata that can go beyond syndication towards synchronisation. Ideally, users should be able to experience, share and manage personal knowledge according to their own individual perspectives. This would mean a move away from the primacy of systems to focus on making it easier for people to find, organise, and share knowledge and information. Combined with techniques such as latent semantic indexing and ontology building, this could make it much easier for us to personalise search engines according to our own point of view rather than just basic preferences.
The advent of XML, RDF and distributed Web services technology in general makes such ideas a real possibility for even relatively small projects. The main benefit of these approaches to technical development is that small, simple, modular applications and services can be developed rapidly, and with a much lower risk and cost. Development techniques that aim for modular code with common properties and methods are also a good idea – Fusebox is an example from the world of Web application development, but there are others. It is gradually becoming more appropriate to think in terms of supplying a pool of shared online tools within common methods and parameters, rather than building a single huge monolithic software product. If that is the case, what is stopping us from being able to build tools around the very people who use them, involving them in the development and evolution of their own online tools and applications?"
11:27:32 PM 
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"A great deal of attention has been focussed on the concept of the "Semantic Web". One of the core ideas behind the Semantic Web is the creation of machine-processable relationships between resource identifiers (URI's). Two often discussed ways of representing those relationships are RDF and Topic Maps. This paper describes how the concepts and goals of Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Topic Maps influenced the design of the Australian Literature Gateway (AustLit) project. "
5:29:18 PM
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"Jetty is a 100% Java HTTP Server and Servlet Container. This means that you do not need to configure and run a seperate web server (like Apache) in order to use java, servlets and JSPs to generate dynamic content. Jetty is a fully featured web server for static and dynamic content. Unlike separate server/container solutions, this means that your web server and web application run in the same process, without interconnection overheads and complications. Furthermore, as a pure java component, Jetty can be simply included in your application for demonstration, distriybution or deployment. Jetty is available on all Java supported platforms. "
5:26:55 PM
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"We're working with our Faculty of Medicine to help them in their Curriculum Information System project. It's a cool way for them to track their enormous and dynamic (i.e., changing) curriculum, as well as the resources that support it. CAREO is being used as a content management component for the MedCIS project. Their portal is built in SunONE Portal, so it's quite different technology. How to integrate? The integration is primarily being done via the RSS feeds exposed by CAREO. Here's what an RSS feed looks like in the portal "home" page. Here's the cool RSS feed editor they built."
5:22:15 PM
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"Imagine searching through your own research notes, Google, and a set of your favorite weblogs all at the same time, the results coming back to you ranked in a meaningful order. Imagine getting relevant results to a search even when there is no keyword match, or being able to refine your search by selecting a set of good results and asking for more. The presenters, who first met and discussed the concept at last year's ETCon, have been working on just such a project: an open-source latent semantic search engine that lives on the desktop and lets users navigate and search their own writing - notes, articles, or weblog entries. Because it examines patterns of word use across many documents, the tool offers significantly improved search results, and can accept long natural-language search queries, including entire documents. By allowing documents to organize themselves into topic clusters, the tool also offers a macro view of the user's data, in useful digest form. "
5:10:11 PM
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MovableType Trackback spec
5:03:51 PM
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"One of a scientist's key responsibilities is to identify and explore the limitations of his or her work, providing a clearer path for those who follow. Randall Trigg, a hypertext pioneer whose work has always epitomized the finest qualities of the field, may have been too good a scientist in his early work. His 1983 doctoral dissertation, describing a hypertext system for scientific writing, addressed a topic of great importance with such authority (and pointed its own weaknesses so candidly) that it deterred many designers from building upon its foundations. The key section of Trigg's dissertation -- long inaccessible but now, available on the Web -- proposes a catalog of link types. Simple links, like those familiar to all of us, simply point to a destination without explicitly indicating what the destination contains or why the link exists. Trigg sought to remedy this state of affairs by listing the varieties of links that might be expected to appear in scientific writing..."
5:00:04 PM
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"QBullets tell you what a link will do before you click on it. QBullets are a collection of elegant, animated icons that attach to hypertext links to indicate their function. Download them for free! "
4:50:32 PM
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"IntelliJ IDEA is an industry leading Java IDE power packed with leading-edge development features which includes: industry setting refactoring support, intelligent code editing assistance, a wide range of J2EE development features for rapid web-application and other enterprise development, a powerful Code Inspection tool, integrated CVS, VSS and StarTeam support, an Open API for third-party plug-in support, and a mountain of other productivity features that make Java development a pleasure."
10:07:05 AM
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"Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. (It also works on OSX to some extent, but it does not yet deal with 'resource forks' correctly; more information on OSX usage can be found on the unison-users mailing list archives.) It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other. Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc). However, there are several points where it differs: Unison runs on both Windows (95, 98, NT, and 2k) and Unix (Solaris, Linux, etc.) systems. Moreover, Unison works across platforms, allowing you to synchronize a Windows laptop with a Unix server, for example. "
9:41:19 AM
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"SourceJammer is a source control and versioning system written in Java. It consists of a server-side component that maintains the files and version history, and handles check-in, check-out, etc. and other commands; and a client-side component that makes requests of the server and manages the files on the client-side file system."
9:37:31 AM
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"Jarsync is (will be) a Java implementation of the rsync algorithm, a cache-free delta compression algorithm for fast file transfer across a network. Its aim is to provide a high-quality free-software delta compression library for the Java platform, similar in spirit to librsync."
9:34:50 AM
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"SiteMesh is a web-page layout system and web-application integration system to aid in creating large sites consisting of many pages for which a consistent look/feel, navigation and layout scheme is required"
9:28:38 AM
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"WebWork is a web application framework for J2EE. It is based on a concept called "Pull HMVC" Pull Hierarchical Model View Controller). It supports an arrange of view technologies - XSLT, JSP, Velocity, Applet, Jasper Reports, and more"
9:23:58 AM
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"JIRA is a J2EE-based, issue tracking and project management application developed to make this process easier for your team."
9:14:34 AM
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"The Jisp package, com.coyotegulch.jisp, uses B-Tree and hash indexes for keyed access to variable-length serialized objects stored in files. Jisp is "Pure Java", developed with Sun's Java 2 for portability, and tested with IBM and Sun JDKs 1.3 and 1.4 running under Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Build your application around Jisp, and you have a database that is 100% portable across platforms; the source code is in your hand, and you control precisely how your data is related and accessed. This is terrific for standalone or embedded applications, where an enterprise-class database is not a reasonable option. "
9:00:23 AM
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© Copyright
2003
Jon Phipps.
Last update:
6/10/2003; 8:52:59 PM.
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