0Two of the strengths of RDF are the ease with which one can express relationships between things and the ease with which one can mix together different sources of data. Throw into that mix the power of a tool like SIMILE's Solvent to scrape data off different web pages, and we have all we need to take data that people didn't think were (or should be) interrelated and make some more useful relationships. How to represent the relationships? Make use of another of SIMILE's excellent tools: Exhibit.

0That's the story behind a few of my tinkerings lately. First, there's the University of Mary Washington's pages called "Meet the Faculty." Swell, but by "meet" the pages really seem to mean "get contact information, their department and degrees, and a picture." To a student, I wouldn't quite say that that does much to introduce them. That's partly because the "Meet the Faculty" pages are in their own little corner of the university's sites, separated from what the students probably care more about, their actual schedule.

0(The impatient can cut to the chase and go right to the sites I'm driving at: Slice and Dice Your Schedule and Slice and Dice the Faculty. Read on (or come back) for the background.)

0And so, I looked at the "Meet the Faculty" data and the data of course schedules and sent Solvent to the rescue, scraping off the data and putting it into RDF. Since RDF works by identifying resources by URI, those data sets are easily united just by carefully minting URI's for the resources (I use 'carefully' there loosely -- for various reasons I'm not quite satisfied with how I did it this time around, but so far it seems to be functional). Then I could use the RDF API for PHP to store it and manipulate it.

0Even though SIMILE also has a handy tool for converting RDF into the JSON format that Exhibit likes (Babel), I decided to script the conversion myself, mostly so I could handle some prettifying of data on the way to particular Exhibits.

0One result is Slice and Dice the Faculty. Right now, the only real addition in terms of data to the original "Meet the Faculty" pages is that it includes a list of the courses the faculty member teaches. But I think that's an important list--it can say something, at least, about the interests of the teacher, and even let a student think about what future courses he or she might take. (Currently, the list of courses only includes data from the summer and fall semesters, but that will grow as the schedules for future semester become available and I get around to scraping them). When I was a faculty member, I also remember the vague uncomfortable feeling I had that I did not have a good sense of who else taught the same courses I did. And so Exhibit's faceted views comes in nicely to reveal some of those relationships.

0 The second result is Slice and Dice Your Schedule. Starting with a list of courses for the Fall 2007 semester, you can pick out the courses you are taking and info about both the schedule and the faculty member comes up. Again, perhaps a small addition, but I think important. It helps a student think about his or her schedule not as something divorced from the people teaching the courses and from the place where the course meets. In other words, it aims to expose more of the context of education -- it's more than a list of classes, it involves the people and places around you.

0Obvious future steps for Slice and Dice Your Schedule include getting the geodata for each building so it could also make use of Exhibit's map view. Ideally, if faculty seem to like this (I know some will, but I'm curious about how broadly it might be liked), including some basic FOAF info, especially about interests, would be even better for both slicings-and-dicings. Same goes for the classes, since in the RDF I'm modeling each actual course as a subset of foaf:Group. That way, a course can have it's own set of interests, which would tell students even more about the context of their education.

0Another obvious step is to build up the Exhibit display itself. Really, what currently exists is just a basic wireframe. More experimentation with Exhibit is increasingly becoming an urgent need for me.

0In a separate but closely related project (not quite ready for blogging about), student-submitted conceptual relationships between courses is coming up. Tagging those conceptual relationships is there. But tagging everything will be trickier to work into a nice user interface--I find that the data is somewhat complex, and the really sticky part is figuring out how not to make the user interface equally complex.

UPDATE

0Geonames.org already has geodata for all the buildings on UMW campus, and Exhibit's map view was easier to put together than I'd feared, so it now also includes a map view.