Hi all,
Apologies it took me so long to pick up this thread. Slightly later
than planned, here goes:
Background: there seems to be some enthusiasm for supporting
reviews/ratings on the OpenGuides, both of articles, and the things
the articles are about (ie. "Rate this article about the Red Lion Pub"
and "Rate the Red Lion Pub").
Issues: is it worth developing Yet Another Reviewing and Rating
Infrastructure, specifically for the OpenGuides?
Potential Solution: I have developed
Revyu.com <http://revyu.com/>, a
site that acts as a generic platform for creating reviews and ratings
of things (anything at all), on the basis that people can easily get
reviews and ratings back in RDF/XML (via simple GET requests or SPARQL
[1] queries) for reuse in their own applications.
In the context of the OpenGuides, it would be pretty trivial to
provide "Review/Rate this article about the Red Lion" and "Review/Rate
the Red Lion" links on OpenGuides pages, that pass the user to
Revyu.com to provide the review, then sends them back to the OpenGuide
page afterwards, very much like the way "add this to del.icio.us"
links work on sites like The Register. SPARQL queries from the
OpenGuides sites could then retrieve all reviews related to a
particular page, from
Revyu.com, and present the results as desired.
This approach has some nice advantages: it doesn't require changes or
additions to underlying database structures, creation of new reviewing
forms or scripts to do RDF output of reviews (this is all provided by
Revyu), and may help the OpenGuides reach new audiences as content
would show up on other sites. It would also serve as a nice
demonstration of the power of doing things Semantic Web-style, and how
amenable Open Guides are to this. Disadvantages are few IMHO, mainly
that it would require SPARQL support to be added to the OpenGuides at
some level. On the upside, I think there are decent Perl libraries for
SPARQL, and it is a fun thing to learn. As an interim solution we
could always use iframes or some other method to show content from
Revyu on the OpenGuides.
So, what do people think? Is this something people would be interested
in doing? Please fire back any questions, or check out the site
<http://revyu.com/>, or both. Anyone going to Oxford tonight for the
Hackfest will probably be lucky enough to get a demo ;)
Looking forward to hearing thoughts, comments, etc.
Cheers,
Tom.
[1] This is a nice intro to SPARQL:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/j-sparql/
Ooh, I really like the idea of Revyu!
One suggestion: OpenID support. I'm about to try to attack it again with
OpenGuides and a couple other projects. It would be really nifty to be
able to use a distributed "Identity" across Revyu and OpenGuides ... it
would make meta queries like "show me all guide pages Edited or Reviewed
by chris(a)prather.org" possible via smushing and SPARQL. In a longer
context it would make "show me all pages in the London Guide that people
I trust like" which would smush your personal Foaf for foaf:Trust, the
Guide and Revyu ... in a nicely semantic way.
-Chris
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