A 'directory' for UMWBlogs has been cooking conceptually for some time, and has now started cooking into code. The first thing I'm working on is grabbing data from feeds and turning into RDF. I have a test/demo of the first draft of the system here.

Here at University of Mary Washington we've been maintaining an installation of WordPress MultiUser, called UMWBlogs for several months. We now have about 800 registered blogs from students and faculty for their teaching and learning.

For a variety of small to medium-sized projects (at least as things are measured here), I've needed to model bits of pieces of the elements of my university, University of Mary Washington.

A bit ago I blogged about the tangled graph of SIOC info, collected up from the blogs of some of my colleagues.

Additional lesson learned on the Fishtank (earlier lessons and description here ): RSS2.0 wrinkles. Sometimes I get links within blog reported within the rss:content or description elements, sometimes not (depending on the blog). That's a little sad, 'cuz it disrupts the construction of sioc:links_to information, and I'd like to explore what could be done with that info. For example, I think it's interesting to compare the tags/categories used on a post with the tags/categories used on a post the first post links to.

There are still wrinkles that need ironing (which comes as no surprise to those familiar with my sartorial style), but the Fishtank for Faculty Academy is up and running. Here's a description and screenshot, along with how it works and some lessons learned.

Fishtanks are colorful, interesting, and constantly transforming -- just like the intellectual life around the Faculty Academy. We're using that metaphor to describe what we're capturing here, a view on the blog posts about Faculty Academy events. (Information about registering your blog to be included in the list is in your program). The blog page gets you into scuba gear to dive right into the depths of the blogs. Here, you're looking into the fishtank to see an overview of the posts, including the author, tags and/or categories used for the post, a preview, and what sites the post links to. You can focus in on any of those aspects by clicking on the information in the four boxes below (kinda like focusing on the little treasure chest, or on the log, or on the kelp, etc.). Enjoy the variety of ways to look at our time together (just don't ask who's the plecostomus).

How it works

First, we asked attendees who plan to be blogging the conference to register their blogs, so we have a list of the blogs, who owns them, and their RSS feeds. (The RSS feeds are also used by Jim Groom to use WordPress-O-Matic to collect all the posts to the Faculty Academy blog page). A (somewhat hastily cobbled) PHP script uses RAP and Triplr to look for posts with "FA07" as the tag or category put that info into a big, beautiful RDF Graph. Along the way, I add in some extra SIOC data. This much is reworking earlier work I blogged about here. Then, parts of that graph are exported into a JSON file to be used by SIMILE's Exhibit. And "ta-daa!" you've got the exhibit of people blogging the Faculty Academy.

As lots of classes and groups are taking off with blogging, we're starting to address something that I hinted at in my last post, the possibilities for sparking more intellectual interaction between the classes that have overlapping topics. One is Talkdigger, the subject of my last post. But deeper down is one of the ontologies Talkdigger depends on, the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) project.

The idea is pretty simple--gee, we have all these wonderful online communities within blogs, community sites, discussion boards, etc. Wouldn't it be neat if the Drupal-powered ones could share information with the Wordpress-powered ones? Plugins let that happen by exporting the relevant info and making it available on the Semantic Web, ready for something like Talkdigger or another applicatoin to pick up and bring together. Or, just for it to be in a repository ready to get sparqled by another app. Voila and ta-daa! Youv've got the connections between those communities!

The Drupal SIOC module is here, and the Wordpress plugin is here.

SIOC includes properties (roughly the same as fields) for things like membership in a forum, roles within a forum, avatars used, and of course information about replies, links, and relations. The full technical spec is here.

Fantastic and exciting developments in one of my favorite worlds, that of rdf and the semantic web! I haven't had a chance to surf around and read material for a while, so there's too much for one blog post and I'll get to them all eventually. The big ones to know about are version 3 of Piggybank, the SIOC ontology (where was I that I missed this coming up?!?), and Talkdigger.

Talkdigger makes a nice move in describing itself as "Semantic Web Ready." It's an apt description, I think, in pointing up the new ways of envisioning the relationships between content on the web that the semantic web will bring while tacitly acknowledging that it's not in the air yet. But with Talkdigger, we're getting to liftoff velocity.

Talkdigger lets users pick out a conversation taking place on the web by focusing on a URL that's a node in that conversation. It then searches around, both in a general web search and within other conversations already in the system, for other nodes in the conversation and starts putting together the relationships between them. In that way it is similar to co-comment (I confess I haven't used co-comment, though, so I hope someone who has will help make the comparison). It uses the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) ontology to produce the connections. The result is a way to make connections between online conversations and the people producing them.