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Wednesday, January 19, 2005 |
Image Annotator. This is a beautiful use of Javascript, RDF and
XSLT to create a system that annotates images. Go to the
image
link to see the final result first. Take a look
at the page source; you'll see that it is written in RDF,
and specifically, a combination of three schemas: Dublin
Core, FOAF and an Image schema. Now go to the image
annotator itself to see how the RDF file was
generated. Follow the instructions on the page and generate
your own RDF. The page you are looking at is generated
entirely in Javascript; you could download it and run it
off your desktop (I did). The script generates the RDF you
saw when you viewed the source. To actually view the image,
you need to place the two associated stylesheets (available
here
and here
and add a link to the the first at the top of the RDF file.
I did this manually (here).
The image can also be viewed in different formats - as an
audio recording, as XHTML, as a Flash file - using
different stylesheets. The Kanzaki site uses a server
script to insert the associated stylesheet. I know this all
looks complicated, but it's not; it's the same sort of
thing I did here,
and that Daniel Lemire did here.
I'll explain it all in a paper sometime soon. But for now,
here's the punchline: This is the future of
learning objects. I'll have much, much more about
this topic in the next twelve months. By Masahide Kanzaki,
The Web Kanzaki, January, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
9:21:17 AM  Google It!.
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Yahoo to acquire Six Apart?. This is just speculation, nothing more. But it
would seem to be a natural; Yahoo doesn't have a blogging
tool (while both Microsoft and Google do). Six Apart now
also brings into the mix the large LiveJournal community,
which could be integrated into Yahoo's own family of
communities. Yahoo also brings a lot to the table for users
of those services, itself having probably the best designed
community services on the web. And the blogging sites
provide an outlet for text ads, now a better revenue
generator than ever. By David Jackson, The Internet Stock
Blog, January 17, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
9:19:33 AM Google It!.
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Enable a Wiki Folksonomy Emergence. Rand Anderson is thinking about how to manage his tagsonomy more easily and that got me thinking about tagonomies and folksonomies for wikis.
There is some great thinking around folksonomies and how they will
beat out more top down / professional taxonomies. Here are some links
to get your started if you are interested:
Lou Rosenfeld's Folksonomies? How about Metadata Ecologies?
Adam Mathes's Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
Peter Merholz's Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?
Social Tagging and its close cousins are a meta data killer app according to Clay Shirky [via Cory Doctorow]:
... users pollute controlled
vocabularies, either because they misapply the words, or stretch them
to uses the designers never imagined, or because the designers say "Oh,
let's throw in an 'Other' category, as a fail-safe" which then balloons
so far out of control that most of what gets filed gets filed in the
junk drawer. Usenet blew up in exactly this fashion, where the 7
top-level controlled categories were extended to include an 8th, the
'alt.' hierarchy, which exploded and came to dwarf the entire,
sanctioned corpus of groups. ...
This is something the 'well-designed metadata' crowd has never
understood -- just because it's better to have well-designed metadata
along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the
axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows
larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling,
so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr
are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of
information architecture.
So group developed meta data trumps the professional developed top down taxonomies. Cool.
Now, a wiki is like a little version of the internet ... lots of
topics, links, resources etc. In response to structure issues in Wikis,
I have always wanted to let the community develop its own method, as I
mentioned in a prior post Wikis are Not Unstructured.
But, sometimes a wiki can be setup in ways that does not help the
community develop its own classification system. So, what can I do to
help a folksonomy emerge in a wiki?
One approach that I think helps is what we see in Wikis like MoinMoin.
It lets users classify content by adding tags directly to the content.
This allows content to be classified in many different ways... and this
is helpful since it is easy to then build queries to find and present
the content that has been tagged .. and it is bottom up and so could,
if actively used, turn into something like a folksonomy. The tags that
are added to the topics themselves link to a master topic for that tag
which displays all the tagged topics. So it is kind of like a social
linking tool.
Now, my wiki work lately has been focused on TWiki.
In this particular case it has an inflexible categorization system
based on forms and fields. Someone needs to decide in advance what the
tags will be ... so a folksonomy never really emerges. The choices are
too structured and all decided in advance and you end up with a lot of
questions like how do I fit x topic into your category scheme? ...
What I think TWiki needs is a convention/technique that allows users
to add 'tags' to wiki pages as simple text and then have ways of
presenting the folksonomy that emerges. What I think I want to do is
something like what MoinMoin does which is to just embedd the tags as a
piece of text in the topic. It is visible to everyone ... and so would
encourage a less structured approach to classification .. especially
since we could apply as many tags as necessary to any topic ...
something that the form approach can't do.
I thought through the idea of using a tag as a topic and having that
topic link to the topics that are 'tagged' ... but that seems to be too
much effort for a wiki. I think a better solution is to have tag pages
that query for all pages that have that tag on them ... This approach
is also more group friendly (having your single category choice changed
by a Wiki Gardener isn't nice. Having them add a few more tags to your
page on the other hand is a great compliment. Refactoring tag names is
also easier since all you would need to do to rename a tag is rename
the tag topic that have TWiki fix all the links ... and voila you're
done.
Am I implementing MoinMoin's category stuff in TWiki .. yes I think
so ... I wonder if anyone else has done anything similar in TWiki.
Definitions
[via Planet Python] [All things Jythonic]
9:11:05 AM Google It!.
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Jython Devlopment Toolkit (JyDT). Checkout this Jython plugin for Eclipse:
The Red Robin Jython development plug-in for Eclipse aims to
provide most development facilities expected by a Jython developer. The
project started in November 2003 and is carried out with limited
resources. There are no big plans about where to go with the plugin.
The evolution is driven by the needs of the users.
[All things Jythonic]
9:02:32 AM Google It!.
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The Portable Mac OS X Geek.
Got a Pocket PC? Then you, too, can control your PowerBook from
anywhere on the globe. You travel, it stays. Just make sure you've got
someone at home who can reboot. Leander Kahney reports from San
Francisco. [Wired News]
9:00:45 AM Google It!.
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WordPress Multi User (WMU). A long-standing complaint about the use of
WordPress, the free and open source blogging software, in
an academic environment is that no multi-user version was
available. With the launch of WordPress MU, this is no
longer true. “Using WordPress Multi-user edition you will
be able to [have] people be able to sign up for a new blog
and have them securely manage their templates and settings
without affecting any other users. Only one blog per user
is allowed, but you can have unlimited users, and you can
have multiple users on a single blog.” Farmer has another
comment, which I'll link
to but not cite because the link comes with a
language warning. Suffice to say he was, um, enthusiastic.
Heh. By James Farmer, Incorporated Subversion, January 17,
2004
[Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
8:58:56 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2005 Bruce Landon.
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