Mark, Query, and Visualise
2010-03-10 Confoo Conference, Montréal
Sarven CapadisliCreative Commons
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about:csarven
- Front-end code, ux design guy
- Believe in open knowledge
- INTP (Introvert, iNtuitive, Thinker, Perceiver)
Overview
- 0. Blah 1. Mark 2. Query 3. Visualise 4. Let's talk
- General approach to writing smart tools and Web sites
- No stupid hacks! Use everywhere
How are these related?
contentpagetitle
showhide_heading
csc-firstHeader
post-title
node-type-page
post-482
xyz
foobarbaz
junglelove
You say tomato, I say tomahto
Joomla: contentpagetitle
TikiWiki: showhide_heading
TYPO3: csc-firstHeader
ImpressCMS: post-title
Drupal: node-type-page
WordPress: post-482
Symfony: xyz
Zend framework: foobarbaz
eZ Components: junglelove
Tower of Babel
Semantic data
- Use microformats, RDF(a)
- Smart data neutralizes the advantage of proprietary / patented / really smart software
- Linked data + Open data -> :)
Where to?
- From Web of documents to...
- Web of things/concepts (databases)
More standards? Yes, No, Maybe
| microformats | RDFa |
|---|---|
| - No namespaces (e.g., URI, dirs, prefixes) | - Namespaces |
| - Limited vocabulary | - Any vocabulary (e.g., FOAF) |
| - Common problems and solutions | - Open |
| - Not extensible | - Extensible |
| - Visible data favoured | - Meta data is okay |
| - Community decides definition | - Anyone can create their own definitions |
| - Fairly easy to implement | - Medium-ish |
We know markup is important because
- Consumed by humans
- Most widely used standard on the Web
- Very portable, Reuse
- Decent data container
- Cached Web pages are our archival / backup
- HTTP cache
- Ordinary Web pages can act as an API
Enough about markup. Let's query
- Query with
- XSLT/XPath
- DOM scripting (e.g., jQuery selectors)
- SPARQL (~ SQL for your RDF)
- But, what about APIs?
- Firefox Microformats API
- Google Social Graph API, Yahoo Search Monkey
- YQL
- foobarbaz API
- Either way, think of Querying instead of Searching
Choose carefully, because
- Easy -> Show me all of the videos on a page
- Not as easy -> .. and in public domain.
- Harder -> All soccer players, who played as goalkeeper for a club that has a stadium with more than 40000 seats and who are born in a country with more than 10 million inhabitants
Cool stuff
- Combine information - mashups (powerful stuff)
- Show me a map of each news story
- Accidental or intentional API?
- Subscribing to structured content
- Smart searching
- microformats -> GRDDL -> RDF
Example uses
Example uses
| .. and a zillion more out there | |
| hAudio | User-agents can play this audio, hAudio to RSS2.0 |
|---|---|
| hReview | Book review |
| rel-license | Sarven's content licensed under CC 3.0, Flickr photo |
| Sigma | Semantic search mashup |
| Microformats Support Built Into Firefox 3 | JavaScript API - Intro |
| Yahoo Search Monkey | Custom search results for identica Profiles, |
| RDF/SPARQL query bot | Query data |
Good development process
- Data outlasts code: Open data > open source
- Search engine site caches can help restore "catastrophic data loss"
- Managing projects
- Information architecture
- Development
- Content editorial