Frédérick Giasson revealed a pre-release of the zitgist semantic web browser. It's a great leap forward in making RDF data readable and browsable to people who would be perfectly happy in their lives never needing to see the acronym RDF.

A small group of the faculty and instructional technology staff have been thinking hard about how to reinvent -- or at least re-present -- the intellectual life of students and faculty on campus. Martha Burtis has started the discussion here.

Recently there's been a renewed vigor in an effort to develop a new bibliography ontology for semantic web applications.

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.

DBpedia recently added a search facility that beautifully shows off the power of structured searching--treating content on the web as a database, rather than as a big pile of documents.

Google-like, you have a simple, one-input interface to start your search over the DBpedia set of data, Wikipedia, put into the nice structure of RDF (i.e., semantic web). Un-Google-like, the results pull up an image for the hits if one exists (a very nice touch!). And, even better, you get a tag cloud at the top that you can use to filter the results. So, for example, type in "education" and you get a tag cloud that includes such filters as "academic degree," "professional association, "civil right," "government department," and many more. Click the filters to narrow down your search.

As is to be expected, there are plenty of unexpected tags in the cloud. The tag "party" in the same search, for example (it leads to "Liberia Education and Development Party"). Or "album," leading to a number of albums with the word "education" in the title. That will be both a strength and weakness, depending on the user. To people with a strong training in traditional library searches (lots of booleans and classification systems), it could be a little disconcerting. But, if you put that aside, it provides a way into the data that is more intuitive in some ways. Say, for example, I heard a really great song, but the only thing I remember about it is one word from the title of the album. . .

Jim Groom and I did a talk this week for ACCS on tagging and the semantic structured web. The upshot is looking into ways to use the structure and searching power of RDF to create new ways to make use of tagging. Here, it's looking at tags on blogs.

Below are a few examples of RSS feeds, plus a link to a SIMILE Exhibit, that demonstrate some of the possibilities. Instead of feeding out syndicated content, they're feeding out remixes of data coming in from RSS feeds (a lot like Yahoo Pipes, but when we get to the last example the differences will be clear). The RDF graph at the heart of it is based on a snapshot of the feeds from about 10 people, with some SIOC data added on top. It's all done with the help of RAP. I was getting some unexpected results here and there from RAP's feed parser (Magpie), so I sent the feeds through Dave Beckett's Triplr.