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