Another post to explain some ideas and a desire for a tool that worked with notes and RDF…

[ after episode one ]

Let me cite a nice sentence in the Scholar Google home page:

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Let’s start now with a brainstorming list of the topics of this post:

microcontent rdf notes relations aggregation recombination ideas rss tags folksonomies sparql mindmap

Starting with the end of the last post…

The last post ends with a very interesting citation from Danny Ayers idea…

I am totally agree with him: but for now i want to concentrate me with the note taking everyday task…

What i mean?

I mean that with the software available there isn’t a way to collect notes graphically fast and simple and scalable as drawing mind maps or sort of in a paper with a pen…
And a way to save the implicit semantic of these notes and these schemas…
Some efforts with mind maps in Java, but nothing using RDF model as base…

I’m thinking also as someone else has noticed [ thanks Alberto ] that we can work with a form of Microcontent in everyday task, a sort of bottom up way to organize ideas and concepts…

We can think about something that helps us in these tasks?

State of art of web useful services…

There are three different web tools that i’m interesting in:

  • del.icio.us
    interesting features:

    *   tags
    • usability and web based REST application
    • XML and JSON data exporting
    • social application and implications

  • Refeed : > reFeed is a PHP-based server-side RSS aggregator/reader that allows for quick, easy, iterative filtering, editing and re-syndicating of posts. Its output is an RSS feed that contains numerous metadata necessary to re-publish posts with appropriate attributioninteresting features:

    • recombination and merging data
    • RSS feeds exporting
    • personalized feeds

  • Wanabofrom Wikipedia :> Wanabo is a service that enables sites to create and tag pages.

    By placing a short piece of JavaScript code on a page, **the service can allow visitors to apply tags to each page**. This is a technologically neutral solution that enables folksonomy anywhere on the internet.

**A tag navigator and tag cloud are automatically built as tags are added**.interesting features:

    *   social tagging by user directly visible in sites, not in another location as using del.icio.us

I want to make clear that there are some properties of these services that are very useful for the user and to make the Web a better experience…
But also in this kind of stuff i think…

Considerations on implicit semantic in mindmaps and tinderbox applications

During my schools years i as all the normal students had to learn how to study and understand all the stuff where i was involved…

And to make a better comprehension of a concept, or to make clearer an historical fact, i was used to make a sort of notes scheme…Very similar to a mind map, but in these days i didn’t know what “mind map” was…

Now i understand that the tecnology itself of book and papers is linear, and it doesn’t fit the way of our mind work…IMHO..

The mind works in a non linear way, in an associative way; where the linear thinking limits adding text or ideas…

So when in these recent years i have seen RDF model, i understand its power in these terms of use: its open data model, its graph based model… as a non linear way to collect information about anything…

And so its main advantage is to be used in tools like IdeaGraph as Danny Ayers understood and in general as supporter of our ideas managament…

In this context we can see what are the semantics and the usability of graph based note taking…

The main property is the LINKING of concepts and ideas… using simple lines and arcs.. Generally not with a description on it…

Or an arc with some text that explain the relation between the two idea..

So using mind maps the main purpose is to make clear a concept and ideas and content that are related to…

[ An example is the interconnections graph to find criminals and serial killers used by police forces… ]

Using RDF properties to make the same relation explicit we can think about the DC related [ see dc-terms ] or RDFS seeAlso for example…

The problem is that when we are working with a mind map some stuff that using a RDF model is necessary to make explicit, is implicit and leaves to the human interpretation…

  • every idea or concept doesn’t need an identificator
  • our mind knows two ideas that are connected with a line, also without any explicit property label

Also considering a software like TinderBox, there are color and syles grouping concepts, and the importance of ideas related to the dimensions of a word or of a box that contain that word…

Kind of things that human understand, but a software don’t…

Some other ideas…

So here a sort of mind map to collect some features of a tool i’m thinking about…

It’s an incomplete vision, of course…
In the previous post from a general point of view and now from others ideas to make the vision slowly cleaner and more complete.

So i want a tool that aggregates RDF data, from different sources as PiggyBank works, and from SPARQL query points…
These data is simple to recombinate using a Microcontent data aggregation, where available…
And using tags controlled by a personal SKOS vocabulary…
Where i can easily edit my data and ideas, adding data to the data itself without any problems, such Tomboy editing…
In a graphical way, using a web based application that can runs on web servers and on small devices as SPADE applications…
With the data that speaks RDF and so without loosing semantics passing data themselves from the application to another…
And leaving new ways of visualization of the data…easily to add to the application itself…

The red words in the picture are some ideas and implementation notes…
As the Fresnel reference…

The implementation and GUI details will be subjects of future posts…

work in progress