A bit ago I blogged about the tangled graph of SIOC info, collected up from the blogs of some of my colleagues. More of that background pieces are coming together, and the next piece to show off/test/ask for feedback about is "Ask DTLT" (DTLT is the acronym for my group, Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies).

Part of the design requirements of the project is that it should get SIOC info from a variety of sources, without the users needing to do anything. And so I'm starting by grabbing RSS feeds from del.icio.us accounts and blogs (flickr coming soon), and converting it into SIOC. That then gets ingested into a big graph using RAP.

"Ask DTLT" is an instance of a more general set of scripts for foaf:Groups. It does a SPARQL query against the big graph to to get the tags used by the members first. You select the members and tags, and another SPARQL query gives back posts with that tag, along with some additional info about the post, including what it links to.

I'm most interested in that feature of listing what a post links to. I have a feeling that using tags to generate data not just about posts that use it, but also what that post links to, could be interesting and useful for organizing and understanding the results.

The javascript seems much slower than I'd like, but I'll need to check different machines. It should also get a bit speedier when I speed up the PHP--right now the data is in a flat file, which slows each query considerably. (Don't even try it with IE).

Please give "Ask DTLT" a whirl, and leave comments here about it. Thanks much!

Update: Just noticed that there's some duplicate entries. Those should disappear when I move everything to a real database instead of a flat file.

Update #2: Yep...the flat file was processor intensive enough to seriously drag on things. I've moved it into a real database now, and that's helping immensely (though it seems like there are still duplicate entries. . . hmmm).