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May 31, 2005
Delicious Library
"Get your Mac, a webcam, and Delicious Library and rediscover your home library. Just point any FireWire digital video camera, like an Apple iSight ™, at the barcode on the back of any book, movie, music, or video game. Delicious Library does the rest. The barcode is scanned and within seconds the item's cover appears on your digital shelves filled with tons of in-depth information downloaded from one of six different web sources from around the world.
Once your whole library is cataloged, you can find and use your items like never before. Browse, sort, and search through your digital shelves. Sync your cataloged library onto your iPod or print a color catalog and take it with you. Find and purchase new items using Delicious Library's personalized recommendations. Keep track of the items your friends are borrowing using Delicious Library's loan management system, which integrates with Apple's Address Book and iCal."
Makes me wish I had a Mac.
Posted by jonphipps at 02:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Pintlock: a lock for ice-cream pints
Pintlock: a lock for ice-cream pints
Cory Doctorow:A Ben and Jerry's customer requested that the ice-cream come "in stainless steel, bulletproof containers with a little padlock." The company didn't go that far, but they did create this lockable pint-lid that fits over your ice-cream …
Posted by jonphipps at 10:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 25, 2005
SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP
SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP
Sajax is an open source tool to make programming websites using the Ajax framework — also known as XMLHTTPRequest or remote scripting — as easy as possible. Sajax makes it easy to call PHP, Perl or Python functions from your webpages via JavaScript without performing a browser refresh. The toolkit does 99% of the work for you so you have no excuse to not use it.
Posted by jonphipps at 05:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 24, 2005
SIMILE | Piggy Bank
OK, so have people create custom screen scrapers for extracting site semantics, add a shared central repository, shake and you have…
Piggy Bank is an extension to the Firefox web browser that extracts information from existing web pages and stores it in RDF. If a web page already links to RDF information, extraction simply means retrieving that information. Otherwise, Piggy Bank employs custom software code that untangles the “pure” information from the web page’ formatting.
Having extracted the “pure” information and stored it on your computer, Piggy Bank can now apply its own user interface to let you browse through that information independent of the original web sites. For example, Piggy Bank can call upon Google Maps to display geographical information even if the original web sites do not offer cartographic views of their data.
Furthermore, by storing “pure” information from different web sites in the same data model, Piggy Bank can offer a unified view on the “pure” information regardless of its many origins.
The piece of software code that Piggy Bank uses to “purify” information within a web page is called a screen scraper. Different screen scrapers are made for different web pages. Piggy Bank supports an easy way to install screen scrapers, so that getting better use of a web page’s information is just a few clicks away.
Now add a large scoop of iVia and you have the idea I presented last year to extract the semantically rich information from a site as metadata via screen-scraping. Personally I prefer ‘semantically rich’ to ‘pure’
Posted by jonphipps at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2005
Scott Wilson on e-Portfolios
Powerpoint slides on ePortfolios
Interesting discussion of e-portfolios and how they might be assembled by aggregating parts from different institutional repositories. Scott has talked about this before, but this presentation brings a lot of his ideas together. Remember this?
Posted by jonphipps at 02:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 19, 2005
W3C Working Drafts: Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
Working Drafts: Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
2005-05-10: The Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group released three First Public Working Drafts: SKOS Core Guide, SKOS Core Vocabulary Specification, and a Quick Guide to Publishing a Thesaurus on the Semantic Web. The drafts explain how to express classification schemes, thesauruses, subject heading lists, taxonomies, terminologies, glossaries and other types of controlled vocabulary in RDF. Previous SKOS work was supported by the European project SWAD-Europe.
Posted by jonphipps at 05:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 17, 2005
More outfoxed...
OK, now I’m excited. Once you’ve installed the Outfoxed software in FireFox it adds a small icon to the right of the address. This is what it looks like when a page has been recommended:
There’s also a ‘thumbs-down’ icon for a page that has been NOT recommended. When there are no recommendations (reports) about a page it looks like this:
Clicking on the icon opens a sidebar. Here’s the ‘No reports were found’ entry:
Clicking on ‘Enter Report’ posts the recommendation to the Outfoxed server and results in a report being displayed (from me in this case):
Clicking on one of the hyperlinked tags displays (incredibly slowly) a list of my recommendations containing that tag. Hope they speed this up:
Navigating to a page with the sidebar open displays a list of reports about that page (if any) and the site (if any):
Note the ‘Agree’ button. Clicking on that opens up a new report for me to edit that contains the contents of the report I’m agreeing with:
Note the ‘2 hops’ hyperlink in the reports sidebar:
This displays how far down my personal ‘chain of trust’ this recommendation is. 2 hops indicates that someone that I’ve said I trusted — an ‘informer’ in the Outfoxed ontology — has indicated that they trusted the person making this recommendation. The more hops, the less reliable. Clicking on that link will display the chain, in this case indicating that user damianpenney is trusted by Stan:
Clicking on the recommender’s id will display their personal page and show the pages/sites they’ve reported as well as the users that they’ve trusted. A button allows me to instantly add them as an informer, which will raise their reports in my sidebar:
I think there’s more there under the hood, but this hits most of the high points and should give you an idea about why I’m so excited. One of the things I didn’t show was the integration into Google search results — you can see an example at the Outfoxed screenshots page — but that doesn’t seem to be working for me (not surprising considering how junked-up my browser is).
Lots of potential for integrating special purpose controlled vocabularies into the ‘Enter Report’ interface. It’s open source and we can setup our own server as well.
Now all Outfoxed needs is an RSS/Atom feed from my personal page or an API that allows me to include my Reports in my weblog and insert them including tags into de.lici.us and Furl and I’m ready to abandon all other forms of blogging.
Well, and some things need to happen much faster. Performance is always a challenge, ain’t it?
Posted by jonphipps at 10:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 16, 2005
Trusted Metadata Distribution Using Social Networks.
Oh man, this is GOOD. Way, way more powerful than anything we’re currently doing. Must restrain enthusiasm until I’ve actually used it for awhile…
Outfoxed is the implementation side of my master's thesis at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. The thesis title is Trusted Metadata Distribution Using Social Networks. In a nutshell, I'm exploring ways for you to use your network of trusted friends to determine what's good, bad, and dangerous on the internet. Outfoxed does this by adding functionality to the Firefox web browser. Coding began on Dec 27th, 2004.
…The essential idea of Outfoxed is that people make decisions based primarily on a few people whom they trust. The average person has a set of experts whom they consult in designated areas: the computer expert, the car expert, the fashion expert, the financial expert. If the opinions of these experts can be collected, they are incredibly useful: it is this metadata (data about other data) that gives the most intelligent filtering and sorting of the information on the internet...
via Steven Downes:
“This is a very important development, probably the closest thing to the semantic social network I've seen, and absolutely the way forward. Study this item carefully. Outfoxed "uses your network of trusted friends and experts to help you find the good stuff and avoid the bad." In a nutshell, it captures evaluations and recommendations from your network of friends (which are stored in XM:L and harvested by your harvester). These recommendations are then used to annotate such things as Google searches, application lists and more (for good measure the author tosses in Phishing & spyware protection). There is a Master's Thesis attached to the (free, open source) demonstration software. By Stan James, May, 2005”
Posted by jonphipps at 07:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Screencasting to help your mom
The Indian Blogger: Screencasting to help your mom
This is an excellent overview of some of the tools, commercial and otherwise, for building screencasts. We probably should download and try out the demos for Qarbon Viewlet Builder and Macromedia Captivate which both seem to be in the cost ball-park: $150 – $250 US educational. The head-to-head comparison links at the end are worth following. I think we should be looking closely at narration dubbing and powerpoint integration for use in giving remote presentations as well as the general purpose tutorial stuff emphasized in most of these. Oh, and Wink (free) and Demobuilder ($200 until 5/31/2005) look pretty good too, although neither demos voice-over.
Posted by jonphipps at 03:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 12, 2005
Google's War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders...
Excellent analysis of the trend toward ‘folder-less’ information organization in three areas: web directories, email, and desktop file systems. Well worth reading
…[Google’s] famously ambitious mission statement goes well beyond Web Search: they vow to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". But if you examine Google's products closely, you may notice a surprising pattern: Google is attempting to organize the world's information without folders.
Given the dominance of Hierarchical folders over the last 40 years, this is a major development in the history of information management. Implicit in Google's product offerings is an declaration of war: Hierarchy is doomed, and Search is going to kill it.
In this article, we'll take a look at Google's three-front war against Hierarchy…
Posted by jonphipps at 09:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2005
Little tiny scary thing
Stumbled into my office early this morning to grab a little code time only to see my machine staring back at me with the Blue Screen Of Death. <Urk> Rebooted. But it took a long time to Power On Self-Test only to declare that the parameters of the device in the media bay could not be determined. <Urk-argggh> This meant that the ‘little’ 20gb removable drive on which I had very dangerously placed the Windows paging file had self-destructed and thus the BSOD.
These are the moments for which I have another main drive partition with another ‘clean’ install of Windows. Pull the dead drive, reboot. POST is ok, boot into alternate windows. Search Microsoft for exact location of PageFiles key. Download/Install Resplendent Registrar (very nice program, saved my bacon twice now, must pay for it), open up the Windows System Registry hive on the production drive, edit the PagingFile location, save. Reboot. Back in business with 2GB less free space. <Grumble> Go get first cup of coffee to counter the post-adrenaline crash. Start looking for 2GB of crap to throw in the trash.
Posted by jonphipps at 03:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 09, 2005
Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom :
Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom :
… The wiki for the entire national curriculum for South Africa is simply awe-inspiring. I can't help but think that this collaborative construction of curriculum is in some way the future for many reasons...relevance and economics the most obvious. …
Posted by jonphipps at 07:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 07, 2005
QA Focus information for digital libraries
QA Focus information for digital libraries
“By: Marieke Guy and Brian Kelly, UKOLN, Bath, UK on: 05/04/05 [11:49 UTC] (482 reads)
A case study of CC implementation
“Creative Commons (CC) licences are a way to clarify the conditions of use of a work and avoid many of the problems current copyright laws pose. This article describes how a CC licence has been used to maximise take-up of the deliverables from QA Focus, a JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) funded project. It then looks at CC's potential in the European academic sector and discusses relevant issues.”
Posted by jonphipps at 07:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Debunking XQuery myths and misunderstandings
Debunking XQuery myths and misunderstandings
“If you work with XML, Web services, or Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), you will likely benefit from the emerging XML Query (XQuery) standard. XQuery is not even a formally accepted standard, yet dozens of implementations help software architects and developers every day. What began as a standard for querying XML documents now includes the next-generation standards for XML selection (XPath 2), XML serialization, full-text search, and functional XML data modelling. A project of this size is bound to have much myth and misunderstanding that needs to be de-bunked. Here are some of the more common myths and misunderstandings surrounding XQuery…”
Posted by jonphipps at 07:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Managing an XML Data Model in Your SOA
The Data Administration Newsletter
Gabriel - Managing an XML Data Model in Your SOA
Interesting (to me anyway) article discussing the shifting role of metadata from passive passenger to active driver of Service Oriented Architectures. It’s a little hard to summarize because it’s describing both an architectural approach and the process by which he arrived at this approach. A bit dense, but worth reading if you want to get a sense of the shift in thinking required when designing systems in an SOA context in order to maintain data integrity. This is the author’s summation…
“…For collaborative development on the basis of a fully integrated data model, you need to apply strong version control and be able to treat every object as a true, single-source object. You need a software ‘build’ mechanism around the parts of the integrated data model that are expressed in schemas. You need to shift away from the management of metadata at the schema level. You need a user administration framework with roles, groups, permissions, and security. You need conflict resolution, transaction support, and automated generation of schema releases and associated files from identifiable versions of your integrated data model. You should not need to manage metadata by editing schemas and transformations.”
Posted by jonphipps at 07:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 05, 2005
Some good stuff from the FRBR workshop at OCLC
Program and proceedings [OCLC - FRBR Workshop]
"What Do We Want to Identify? - FRBR and Identifier Semantics", by Ketil Albertsen, independent consultant
Presentation (PPT: 88 KB/39 slides)
"Ontologyx", by Godfrey Rust, Ontologyx
Presentation (PPT: 460 KB/57 slides)
Posted by jonphipps at 02:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bosworth's Web of Data
Bosworth's Web of Data
Daniel Stenberg, O'Reilly ONLamp.com“In a keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005, Google's Adam Bosworth suggested that we "do for information what HTTP did for user interface." As a result of a simple, sloppy, standards-based, scalable platform, we now have information at our fingertips from Google, Amazon, eBay, and Salesforce. Bosworth's own company, Google, gets hundreds of millions of hard queries a day. He said they see it as putting Ph.Ds in tanks to drive through walls rather than around them. In addition to the advantages in software, there have been great gains in hardware: one million dollars buys you five hundred machines with 2TB of in-memory data, a PetaByte of on-disk data, and a reasonable throughput of fifty thousand requests per second. This sort of power changes the way you think. For example, organizing things into folders declines in importance. The challenge is to take a database and do for the web what was done for content. Bosworth explained that you "need a model that allows for massively linear scalability and federation of information that can spread effortlessly across a federated web." Solutions that were suggested were to use XML and XQuery. The problem with XML is that unlike HTML, there is not a single grammar. This removed the simple and sloppy aspects of the web. Bosworth predicts that RSS 2.0 and Atom will be the lingua franca that will be used to consume all data from everywhere. These are simple formats that are sloppily extensible."
Posted by jonphipps at 06:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
OAI-PMH - Conveying rights expressions about metadata in the OAI-PMH framework
Has just been released. Remember — you heard it here first 
Posted by jonphipps at 05:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A new acronym - NSDL (think WSDL)
ongoing · Replacing WSDL, Twice
Norm Walsh has proposed ‘NSDL’ – Norm’s Service Description Language and Tim Bray has a followup, proposing SMEX-D.
Let’s make three assumptions: First, that Web Services are important. Second, that to make Web Services useful, you need some sort of declaration mechanism. Third, that WSDL and WSDL 2, despite being the work of really smart people, are so complex and abstract that they have unacceptably poor ease-of-use.
What then? Naturally, the mind turns to a smaller, simpler successor, sacrificing generality and eschewing abstraction; in exactly the same way that XML was a successor for SGML. Well anyhow, that’s the direction my mind turned. So did Norm Walsh’s; his proposal for NSDL also includes a helpful explanation of why Web-Service description is important. My sketch is called SMEX-D.
Interestingly, NSDL and SMEX-D, although both wave the banner of The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work, are wildly different; NSDL is the simplest way you could possibly declare an RPC-style function call with positional parameters. SMEX-D is the simplest possible way you could declare an exchange of XML messages. Which is more important? Are both necessary? …
Posted by jonphipps at 05:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
mIDm - Self-Identification on the World Wide Web - by Stephen Downes
mIDm - Self-Identification on the World Wide Web - by Stephen Downes
This item should be of interest to the identity and authentication folks.
This looks very much like what I’m proposing that we do at some point to enable collection providers to provide metadata, corrections, and brand images. It’s the technique used by Alexa’s info.txt and the DataLibre project. It’s also the method I was planning to use to authenticate oai admins — if they register with one of the admin email addresses supplied by the oai server, then they’re immediately an admin — no further proof required.
The purpose of this proposal is to eliminate the need for any central registry or authentication service. That does not mean that it decrees that they must not exist; certainly, there will always be a need for some sort of guarantor, some sort of third party opinion about the person in question. Rather, it means that such registries and authentication services need not exist, that everything the web site needs to know about users can come from the users themselves.
…self-authentication is good enough (and more to the point, any 'stronger' form of authentication doesn't buy you any greater security than self-authentication does)
What this does, in effect, is to establish a regime where a person's own declaration is the primary source of their identity, their own identity server; they do not need to depend on a proxy (such as a university registration, employment in a corporation, subscription to an internet service provider, or whatever).... A website does not need to belong to a federation, be some part of a trusted network, or some such other secret society. The self-identification network is open: anybody can play.
Caveats
In the sections below I will provide some computer code, written in a programming language called Perl. The code provided is not the self-identification service I am proposing… What I have provided is merely a proof of concept.…what mIDm is not is an authentication service. That is, websites have to take the user's word that they are who they say they are. But what it does do is to provide any user who wants it with a unique identity…
What I am trying to prove here is that we can get a free, open and distributed system of single sign-on self-identification off the ground using nothing more than Notepad, some common understandings, and a little ingenuity. And what I believe we will prove, in the long run, is that this is all we ever needed.
Posted by jonphipps at 05:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 04, 2005
Authentication and Identification ~ by Stephen Downes ~
Authentication and Identification
…We need a mechanism for self-identification. We need a mechanism where clear and unambiguous control is placed in the user's hands, a mechanism that enables the user to declare to every site (or none, if that's their choice), "I am me!" And a way to do this automatically, unambiguously, with with as little effort as possible.
It is my belief, and my contention, that were such a system to become widely available, much of the apparent pressure for authentication would disappear, and we could rely on self-identification to carry the same load online it has always done offline.
This was part one. Tomorrow I will describe such a system, demonstrate a working model, and provide some code that will enable you to try it out for yourself…
Posted by jonphipps at 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 02, 2005
Introducing hReview
Tantek Celik and Technorati have released a draft of a “reviews microformat”. Worth checking out…
“We are pleased to announce the first public draft (v0.1) of hReview, jointly co-authored by representatives from America Online, CommerceNet Labs, Microsoft, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo!. hReview is an open microformat standard for publishing and indexing distributed reviews on the Web. This standard enables users to contribute, identify, and aggregate review content on their own web sites and blogs as well as on community sites.
…
Want to get involved? Check out the hReview distributed reviews specification, take a look at the examples, and help build implementations for your favorite publishing tools and sites. … Feedback is strongly encouraged.”
Posted by jonphipps at 01:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Testing BlogJet
I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It's a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools).
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso
Posted by jonphipps at 12:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack