My research has been mentioned in a few media channels.
... What struck me about SIMILE and Freebase was the way in which both projects cut through the fog of semantic web technologies and terminologies and got down to brass tacks: How do you get people to want to contribute structured knowledge? You have to appeal to natural instincts and, as I explored in my writeups of both projects, they do.
For MIT's Project SIMILE, David Huynh built an amazing series of web tools for exploring and organizing structured information. Two months into his new gig at Metaweb, he's done it again. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Huynh about his Parallax prototype, which creates a powerful new way for users to click their way through related sets of information in Freebase. In essence, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation.
... What if publishing interactive, data-rich pages were made simple, so that all you needed was HTML savvy, a few tutorials, and sample pages from which you could copy and paste � just like in the pioneer days of web publishing? Even better, what if you could mash data from other pages with your own or make your data available for others to reuse?
... Course Picker is compelling because it offers several features not available through the online subject listings and schedule. The latter, designed in the early 1990s, does not offer the flexible searching made popular by Web 2.0 sites.
{Stefano @ 35:00} ... my colleague and friend David Huynh is on the forefront of that--he's the author and creator of most of our tools on the UI side--Timeline, Exhibit, Potluck. He really captures and understands the need for unlocking this chicken and egg problem...
{Stefano @ 36:35} ... and I have to say David has incredible vision on that side. He really puts himself in the shoes of a user that really doesn't care nor want RDF to succeed...
... Going a step further, the amazing David Huynh -- who is responsible for many of Project SIMILE's innovative web applications -- has created a tool [Potluck] that almost anybody could use to make those equivalences.
... what I'm really trying to draw attention to, in the examples of Freebase and SIMILE, is a design pattern, for information and communication systems, that puts people first, recognizes human desires and talents, and optimizes for collaboration.
... I don't think that any semantic web skeptic, and I have been one, has ever disputed the value that can emerge when you traverse RDF-style data sets. The question has always been: How will we get people to create those data sets, in ways and for purposes meaningful to them? The Simile team are laser-focused on solving that problem, and from what I can see they're biting off huge chunks of it with these tools and methods.
I'm not suggesting that ontologies will play no role, but I've long believed that we need to evolve toward them from real data that people can create, use interactively, and begin to cross-combine. That's exactly the approach that Simile is taking. Seeing it in action, and then easily reproducing it myself, totally made my day.
... One of the tools we're currently working on is called "Exhibit." This is a tool that lets anyone take a collection of anything they care about and put it on the web as a rich, interactive, web-2.0 style site without doing any programming...
... In the same way HTML limits the ways information can be presented the Libraries have also been limited to cataloging their information according to specific predefined criteria such as author, title, year of publication, and name of the journal.
The Exhibit tool, currently in production and available for use as Open Source software, is one way SIMILE is breaking down some of these constraints. It allows a user to gather information about any topic and arrange it according to their personal preferences.
