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Building Free Local Information Systems
Jo Walsh
This event took place on 2nd November 2005 at 1:15pm (13:15 GMT)
Knowledge Media Institute, Berrill Building, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, MK7 6AA
A year ago wirelesslondon prototyped a 'local portal' service for 802.11 wireless networks. People can sign their node up to the network map, just as consume.net used to work, then run the WifiDog client on their node to connect users to the portal service. This collects information about places and things nearby in the form of geo-annotated feeds of RSS, RDF and other structured data. Information is all user-contributed, and the context includes a user-written free-for-reuse map based at http://www.openstreetmap.org/, and a spatial wiki at http://london.openguides.org/ .
The NODE.London project adds depth to the local information system - it is a distributed festival in which 'seed nodes' make detailed descriptions of themselves and offer space and resources to potential participants in their area. While working on calendaring tools that connect to the RDF model of space, something on the level of a 'framework' dropped out - nodel.
nodel is a tiny framework for building semantic web meta-applications. It provides an 'interface pack' to many trendy web services with machine interfaces, like flickr, openguides, del.icio.us, et al. You define a world model in an RDF schema, making sure a few key properties are described, then you can generate a web application from the schema, Ruby-on-Rails style. Each nodel application can communicate with the others; the knowledge base is distributed by default.
nodel comes with a spatial feed aggregator and 'stuff associator', bbox. In our setup it runs as an information archive and syndication service: there is one 'big brain' which talks to openstreetmap, openguides et al; then the smaller nodel applications - the portal/map service, the event publishing service, the topic-based email archive explorer - all talk to it, asking for information 'nearby' (to a place, perhaps also to a time or a person) and telling it what they learn. This 'brain' will also be available as a HTTP based web service for other apps, such as the main WifiDog captive portal auth service, to collect feeds from.
This short seminar will present a rapid overview of the tools then get right down to the workings and building of applications in the hope of being able to customise the service in the afternoon. Knowledge about RDF and how it works would be a really big plus for attendees. |
The webcast was open to 100 users
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 Click below to play the event (39 minutes) |
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