Leading up to the Linked Data pre-conf at cod4lib09 there were several irc discussions around just how to structure the day and what could we do to give attendees the best shot at having an “ah-ha moment”. One idea was to create a simple application that would demonstrate the potential of linked data while also being participatory. I think it took Ed Summers less than 24 hours to hack together the first iteration of the cod4lib2009 attendees foaf crawler/gallery thingy. He can usually be counted on for such feats of overnight engineering.

By the day of the pre-conf we already had a gallery of 20+ foaf profiles. I spent part of the afternoon that day trying to guide several folks through the process of creating a foaf file and getting linked into our new corner of the web of data (with varying degrees of success). Along the way several people added enhancements, bugs were identified and sometimes fixed, much was learned re: linked data, vocabs, hash fragments vs. 303s, etc. Jonathan Brinley and Michael Klein even wrote a companion Supybot plugin for our irc bot, zoia. It was fun.

Since then my mind has come back to it now and then, mulling over how simple it would be to push some of the variables into a configuration file and make the crawler + gallery re-usable for other events, for example, the soon-to-be-happening BarCampBoston 4. This turned out to be relatively easy, and pretty quickly I had an demo attendees page for bcb4. Some fellow bcb4 goers were nice enough to participate by them asserting their attendence in their FOAF files and me pretending to know them. I’ve decided not to try leading any sessions on linked data or foaf at bcb4, mostly because it’s my first time and I want to soak up what other folks are into, but maybe it’ll make for a good ice-breaker or something.

Here’s my problem though: I’m starting to second guess myself as to the level of general usefulness of this thing–which, btw, I have christened gtfo, aka “gitfo”, aka “get the foaf out”–outside of the context of a tutorial/demo. I mean, could it really even function as an actual conference event attendee gallery? There’s the whole issue of folks needing to foaf:knows each other. I feel like there’s the seed of something cool in there, but it may need a substantial rethink and refactor to get beyond being the equivalent of the pet store shopping cart of linked data apps.

I have a few ideas… like allowing the criteria for inclusion to be configurable as something other than attendance at a specified event… or allowing the crawler to traverse a network of people connected via DOAP assertions rather than foaf:knows… or maybe allowing for galleries generated dynamically based on user input rather than a passive crawler, e.g., 1) choose seed node, 2) choose link relationship, 3) choose inclusion criteria, 4) generate gallery.

Anyway, if you’re interested in contributing ideas and or code, I’ve pushed my fork of the original app to Github: http://github.com/lbjay/gtfo/tree/master.

To cut to the chase, I extracted the hCal events from the 2009 conference schedule and fed them into a Simile Timeline. I then linked each event to the corresponding slice of my IRC client log. If you want to take a look it’s here.

I don’t remember what initially sent me there, but my introduction to Code4Lib was through the IRC channel. I’ve been logged in there off and on ever since. It keeps me informed and entertained and, yes, occasionally distracted. I’ve since attended all four of the yearly conferences, met and meatspace-friended a good percentage of the #code4lib regulars, contributed a patch here and there to a couple of projects, and helped organize a one-day regional gathering. I guess you could say at this point that I’m pretty fond of the whole thing.

This is why I take it somewhat personally when the annual hand-wringing debate begins over the perceived “cliquishness” of the community. There was much fuss this year–an awkward amount, even, IMO–over 1st-timers vs. old-timers. I make it a point to try and sit with people I don’t know during the lunches and shake a few hands. Lots of folks do the same for dinner.  Basically, IMO, if you feel like an outcast n00b, YOU’RE NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH.

There is, however–and maybe I have a bit of “I haz a straw man. Let me show u it” going on here, but anyway–an aspect of the “code4lib is just a big fat secretive, juvenille high school-ish in crowd” argument where I think we majorly fail, and that is the non-open nature of the backchannel.

I met a lot of awesome new people over the past few days attending the 4th code4lib conference in Providence, RI, Jon Phipps of the NSDL MetaData Registry. I was a little suprised to read he didn’t enjoy the program, but that’s cool. I give him big props for calling it as he sees it. The part that got under my skin, because he’s totally right, was his mention of “the hugely active IRC back channel of ongoing commentary (which really should be displayed where everyone including the presenters can read it)”. This simply rang true to me.

Let me first say what I’m not saying: I do not think it’s rude and unfair that a bunch of us (100+, depending if you count those not physically present at the conf) are carrying on a parallel conversation while the presenters we have invited are getting up on stage and sharing projects and ideas that they care deeply about and have slaved over. This is the nature of our beast. To paraphrase something BillDeuber said in channel yesterday, is the channel and extension of the conf, or vice versa? I think the latter.

But I do think it’s rude and unfair that we are carrying on an un-open and inaccessible parallel conversation while the presenters we have invited are getting up on stage and sharing projects and ideas that they care deeply about and have slaved over.

The funny thing is, this reasoning is not what first prompted me to put my chat log up on the web. I did it because Corey Harper asked if I’d email him the section from when he was presenting at the linked data preconf and I figured others might like the same courtesy. I also thought Timeline would be a cool project to experiment with. I’ve since had a few conversations about whether or not it’s fair to the people in-channel who maybe didn’t realize what they were saying was going to be published later on. But if someone is accusing you of being cliquish and secretive, how is the proper response not to be more open and transparent? To say, “Here, take a look. See for yourself.”

This is probably making it seem like there must be some really juicy shit going on in the back channel, but that’s exactly the thing: there’s really not. It never gets any snarkier than your typical MST3K episode. And would anyone argue that Joel, Mike, Crow and Tom Servo didn’t really, deep down, love those old, bad movies they were forced to watch?

Last Tuesday I got the chance to sit around for a day with a bunch of talented library & academic technology folks as part of the 1st ever gather of NEcode4lib, the New England “chapter” of the code4lib community. We met at the Boston Public Library and took turns giving short presentations on a variety of topics. I didn’t take greatany notes, but thankfully others did.

The thing I presented on is only about halfway (if that) between an interesting hack and something actually useful. It’s an attempt to create an article metadata scraping service using the CiteULike Plugins. I got the idea a while back from reading this blog post. The basic idea is you take the CiteULike plugins, which are a set of HTML scrapers written in a variety of languages, wrap them in a web service that accepts a URL and a format, and then provide a bookmarklet. A “user” viewing an article at a publisher’s site can then click the bookmarklet and get the article metadata in a variety of formats.

Links:

• slides from the talk are here
• As of now the service is available here
• the bookmarklet is here

Some directions I’m interested in taking this:

• Create a proper python library wrapper for the plugins
• Implement the unAPI 300 response providing links to the resource in the available formats. Otherwise the bookmarklet will be restricted to a default format. Or you’d need a separate bookmarklet for each format
• Add COinS as an output format, i.e. TinyOpenUrl
• Try the same concept but using SpiderMonkey & the Zotero Translators

Update: January 15, 2009 @ 11:08

I’m disabling the demo service linked to above for the time being until I have an opportunity to improve it and make it actually useful/functional.