hello,
i've been working on this service which builds a splash page for
wireless access points from aggregated local information. (which right
now, is just the open guide to london.)
http://space.frot.org/splash/splash/?node=25609 is a quite broken but
hopefully evocative demo of what i am talking about, this will be
fixed soon. we are hoping to get earle involved in making better
integration so we can support openguides, in the new year. we have
been talking about what this might involve and as a byproduct of that
i have been dreaming about more of a machine interface to openguides.
- there are a lot of places in which i can append format=rdf to a URI
and see a nice model. didn't there used to be a RSS feed for recent
changes? if
http://london.openguides.org/index.cgi?id=RecentChanges&format=rdf
included timestamped listings for the changes, that would be good.
i am positing this while running a syndication service as a client,
so a time-based query function - 'show me changes since time t
[within area a]' would also make a lot of sense.
- There's also a 'show me things within n metres of here' function,
and it would be spiffy to have an rdf/xml version of those results.
- better inference about types of things described by pages would
make interesting things possible. on the SF guide for a while i
experimented with using categories to create wordnet terms for rdf
type - e.g. the referent of a page in category 'Bar' becomes a wn:Bar
then you could have type-based queries within OG - 'show me all
things of type foo near here' - though you could do this currently,
i suppose, with the category system.
on the receiver end, i could filter results without resorting to
kludges - e.g. i have a list of n nearby objects and go through them
running a regular expression on each dc:subject, ugh
it would be nice to publish an informal ontology based on
user-created place types, and what you can correlate from wordnet.
i was experimenting with this, but just too much like yakshaving
right at the minute.
Anyway i am hoping to persuade earle to work on something like this
and i wonder what the dev community thinks of it. Also handwavingly
wondering about collaborative filtering; of a foaf-based service which
allows you to outsource recommendations; whether this is asking for
trouble; it's probably worth starting to think about?
zx