We’re releasing Muddy in the next couple of weeks (as a web service complete with a range of APIs and also as an appliance you can rack).

It’s a service that indexes your content and finds ‘notable’ things and can tell you about those notable things (because the entities we identify are part of linked data).

This is cool for a heap of reasons:

• categorise your content dynamically according to the ‘stuff’ your content references
• create “aggregation pages” – aggregation of all your content around a concept (person, organisation, place, event) like, Madonna, or REM or Tony Blair or Shell etc. This is good for users and also SEO.
• produce “related links” – other indexing services do this but, well, we do it too.

All this supports the phenomena of Wilfing, browsing behaviour that stands for “What Was I Looking For”? Horizontal navigation (like related links) supports this ‘need’ amongst people in an age of digital content and this is how Muddy was born, but it offers the scope to do a lot more and one of those things is provide “informatics” about content. To explain this we pointed Muddy at an industry we’re increasingly doing quite a bit of work in, Museums. It’s also apt with Frankie, our Interaction Design Lead speaking and running a workshop at Museums and the Web (@mw2009) in Indianapolis this week (#mw2009).  Fortunately, the Powerhouse Museum last week announced that it was releasing its content under a CC licence (two different licenses are used but we were working on objects so were under the less restrictive license) so we thought it’d be nice to run their content through Muddy and see what popped out.

Of the 70, 000 (approx) items in the Powerhouse collection we sampled 10, 000 things. We then ran them through Muddy to see what was identified. We got quite a lot of positive matches, 50% or 5, 000 to be specific. We would have got far more but many of the objects in the collection have a very short description (this banana leaf cigar is one one we actually got – it’s an object from Samoa!) which does not give Muddy much opportunity to ‘find’ things. We thought location data was interesting and this certainly proved to be one of the most reliable entities that was returned. This is how the sample maps onto the world:

Click on the map for larger image. (We used Spatial Key to provide the mapping.)

This is kinda interesting because it starts to do two things:

• Enable you to analyse and tell stories about the collection
• Provide new ways into the objects in the collection – maps are not great navigational aids in our opinion but they are an aid.

We can see from the map that there is a strong Old World connection and particularly to the UK which will come as no huge surprise given the historical relationship between Australia (where the Powerhouse lives) and the UK. It could also suggest that the Museum is not as relevant to its region and also its minority populations as it could be.

Now this was just a sample of the entire collection. What would be interesting is to take individual categories from the Powerhouse collection and compare them to do a comparative study of the ‘types’ of objects. However, that’s not trivial given the nature of the categories presented. If we wanted to choose for example, electronics, electronics is a ‘silo’ that contains things with the heap of tags. One of those tags is games and games can contain non-electronic objects. So it’s not an exclusive taxonomy. Perhaps, if people think there are some specific tags that would be interesting to map we can do that.

So for us this is an example of Personal Informatics as applied to organisations. Organisational Informatics, producing representations of data that allow you to tell stories about an organisation in new ways, is something we’re really interested in as a way to give voice to objects and allow people to infer meaning and curate collections in new ways. We hope to be doing more of this kinda stuff in the coming months, once Muddy launches formally.

If you’ve got any suggestions on this piece of work (and organisational informatics generally) and what you’d like to see then please comment or message us.

To welcome in the new year, I thought we should kick off with a blog post about the events we’ll be going to in the coming months.

On Wednesday this week (14th Jan), I’ll be heading down to London for Bettr, a wonderfully named unconference-style event on the fringe of education trade fair BETT. At Rattle, we’re really interested in how the models of engagement that have grown up around the social web can be applied to education, so Bettr should be pretty exciting. The event organisers are using Google Moderator to help pick topics. It’s sold out, but you can add your name to the waiting list if you’re interested in going.

On Thursday next week, (22nd Jan), James will be at the UK North editon of O’Reilly’s Ignite series of mini-conferences, where he’ll be talking about our Folksy web platform for buying and selling craft goods.

Towards the end of the month, on Monday 29th Jan, James is off to London’s V&A museum for a conference on mobile learning. It’s being run by the E-learning group, targetted at the museums, libraries and archives sector. James is going to be talking about some research we’ve done about how teenage audiences use digital devices.

Fast-forward to March, and Rob will be speaking at Think Visibility, a one-day conference in Leeds which looks at the areas of website development that are sometimes left behind. Rob’s session is called ‘The near future of the social web’, where he’ll be looking at the current trends of the social web, and briefing people what they should be thinking about now so they don’t fall behind.

Finally, in April I’ll be off to Indianapolis for Museums and the Web 2009. At this 4-day conference, I’ll be running a workshop looking at social interaction design, as well as presenting a paper looking at how wikis can be used by museums to engage people with their artefacts.

Phew, it’s going to be a busy few months!

If there are any other events you think we’d be interested in, or if you’d like to talk to us about speaking or presenting at your event, leave a comment or get in contact with us.

The BBC’s remit to link to external sources more often has provoked lots of thinking and doing in the area of dynamic linking. The problem with manual linking is that archive links date, it’s expensive, you can’t aggregate or do anything interesting and it’s static. The problem with dynamic linking is defining entities “well enough”, providing relevant ways into different data around a concept and making sure this data is well, ‘right’ for the context . Sounds easy but it isn’t. BBC News has been trialling Apture as one solution to linked data and better linking-out, with some success.

The two day ‘event’ was really insightful for two reasons. Firstly, to understand how DBpedia are moving forward to try and become the defacto resource for much of the development of the semantic web and secondly, how the BBC is working to provide structured, linked, content both through ‘bottom-up’ projects like programme pages and through ‘top-down’ projects like Apture and their ‘Meta’ project. The end point for the BBC is not just a better user experience and a more Public Service, but an architecture that is embedded in the web rather than on top of it which has to be good for the web as a whole.

For our part Rob presented Muddy Boots, the project we’ve been doing for the BBC, as part of the two day event.  The DBpedia chaps were also there (hello!) and were presenting some of their plans to develop the service. One of their ideas is to take dumps of some of the LOD (linked open data) sets out there.  This seems to run counter to the idea of linked data but they explained that there are efficiency gains to be had if they’re actually taking the LOD data and allowing access to it too.  It’s what Freebase do of course and there was some discussion as to whether Freebase may actually be a better resource, but the commercial nature of Freebase was felt to be an impediment to building with it (if it were then to change to a cost / fee based system, it could affect the BBC’s ability to use it).

It was nice to meet the DBpedia guys as we’re heavily plugged into their architecture for presenting disambiguation and semantic richness from named entities (we know this is a person because they have the following attributes in the db and therefore we can present the following relevant objects back e.g. homepage, age, constituency etc.). What I found particularly interesting was the work they intend to do in structuring infoboxes from Wikipedia. Infoboxes are loosely structured templates to help summarise a subject. There are thousands of infoboxes on Wikipedia and currently they can’t really be used by DBpedia because they’re not structured templates at all:

They are a broad class of templates commonly used in articles to present certain summary or overview information about the subject. In theory, the fields in an infobox should be consistent across every article using it; in practice, however, this is rarely the case, for a number of reasons.

The DBpedia chaps said that they were going to manually process 400-500 of the infoboxes for structured data as this would account for 80% of all infobox templates. That means we can start to mine the really interesting summaries in a structured way for *most* concepts, soon. Woo.

The BBC also showed some of their work defining concepts within a given body of text and then presenting back topic pages (aggregation pages) based on these concepts. Neat stuff. We’re hoping to plug Muddy in as one of their ‘meta’ sources soon. It’s an exciting time to be looking at the world of “point-at-things” as there seems to be a critical mass of work now enabling linked data to forge semantic relationships. Our hack of Muddy into the BBC Music artist pages is a prime example, drawing two disparate databases (music; news) together around a concept (the artist). It’s a neat way to make a seamless connection and a nice horizontal navigation experience for the user.

You can see Rob’s presentation, below with a hint of slideology goodness:

The details of the talk are here, it’s titled “Adding Semantic Markup to Your Rails Application with DBpedia and ActiveRDF”, a little snappier than the title for my XTech talk

Euro Railsconf is in Berlin this year and I’ll be trying to attend : Starling + Workling: Simple Distributed Background Jobs with Twitter’s Queuing System, Modeling Denormalization – The Speed You Need, the Order You Crave and EC2, MapReduce, and Distributed Processing. I’ll post the talk up when it’s done.

May also saw another BBC project kick off.  Followme came out of the BBC Labs in Masham in April. Rob’s thinking through a catchy, technical working title for the project at the moment More to come later in the summer.

Let us know if you’re going to be there …

I’ll be talking about “Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives” which relates to the work we’ve been doing with the BBC around social media.  The proposal submission was:

In this session I’ll demonstrate and explain a method to use socially authored data as a proxy for currency and as an authoritative information source.  This data can be used to provide context and add further contextually relevant content and meta-data to newly published and pre-existing media archives, providing new ways to navigate the content.

By looking at how we can use sites like Wikipedia, Freebase and DBpedia as authoritative sources of content and meta-data, and utilising services such as del.icio.us to provide a measure of popularity and currency (what is being discussed at this point in time), we can generate additional meta-data that can be used to provide new routes through existing content archives that start to help support a wilfing based browsing approach.

These techniques will be demonstrated via a working prototype that was developed by Rattle as a research project for the BBC, targeting the main BBC News site, with the aim of augmenting the existing archive and providing different routes through the content.

I’ll examine some of the problems inherent in the method, such as contextual ambiguity (Australia the country vs. Australia the song), bias in the data-sources (e.g. the sheer volume of different tags for Google in del.icio.us) and how some content can be linguistically, culturally or geographically distinct and thus less relevant.

XTech is in Dublin this year, come and join us!

The lads at Northcrew videoed the entire thing, if you missed it you can catch it here.

At this months Leeds Geekup we’re relocating to Old Broadcasting House, where we’ll be introducing Christian Heilmann who works for Yahoo! UK as a web architect.  He’ll be talking about the YUI Javascript library and other things Yahoo.

Christian is a member of the Web Standards Project’s DOM Scripting Task Force and has written a number of articles and a couple of books on Javascript to boot.

If that isn’t enough for you, then we’ll have some fine real ale and nibbles to keep you going !

When : 6:00 PM Wednesday February 20th, 2008
Where: Old Broadcasting House @ Leeds Met, LS2 9EN