This Week's Plan

My plans for this sprint are to create a navigable interface for the data Open Calais has returned that focusses on people and connections between people. To begin with this might just be "people pages" or an A to Z page but I also was to quickly start using a few lovely visualisations.

I then want to host this data on a site that people can play with (and into a subversion repository). I will initially use Django simply because I'm very familiar with it but the intention is that this will add data to a Cyn.in (or Plone site) so I have bought a book on Plone development so I can start thinking about saving data to the ZODB...

So that I can start simply and learn how the ZODB works, the plan is to...

1. Create a crawler for events that saves regular "Events" objects into the ZODB. 
2. Create a new content type for "Places". This may have a lat/long and in the long term should be displayed on a map.... maybe on an iPhone. This is a bit more involved
3. Create an RSS  or RDF grabber Product so that I can integrate people, places, concepts etc with other linkeddata sources... if only to grab an image that represents York the city.

Slight concern: This sort of means that I'll be splitting my direction... one will be looking at visualisation in Django/MySQL the other is looking at data manipulation and integration within Cyn.in (the environment that will ultimately host this data). I'm hoping that once I have got to the end of the visualisation experimentation and the Cyn.in integration work I will be able to pull the two neatly together somehow. 


Visualisation Tools


Infovis looks simple enough and perfect for what I need. I particularly like the Hypertree thing (shown below). Here Jeni has taken some government open data about burglary and shown it on a hypertree... brilliant!

The yFiles library has aGraph viewer component but it seems too complete, and it's not as black (which is cool).

Protovis has some very nice display options, I may come back to this later.

Both Raphael and Processing look extremely powerful (go look at the examples) but I will come back to them later once I've done the simple(r) stuff.

One of the lessons learned from the project already is that once you get lots of people working in an open environment that the "Activity Stream" soon resembles a fire-hose of "too much" information. This suggests that the Home Page of any collaborative environment needs to think about displaying aggregate data or visualisations rather than actual data as a way to make the Home Page useful. So it's going to be interesting to try and find novels ways of displaying what for the most part will be conversations.