Two 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.

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.