#iSoc12 Ontoforce
Hello, I’m Jeppe and I’m working on a project for Ontoforce in collaboration with Multimedia Lab (MMLab).
Ontoforce
Ontoforce is a company that uses semantic web technologies to improve data handling. At this moment they are working on a product for the medical sector.
Multimedia Lab (MMLab)
Multimedia Lab is a research group within Ghent University. A part of their research focuses on the semantic web. That’s why they are an ideal partner for Ontoforce.
The project
The project I’m working on is a feasibility study for a faceted browser, using semantic web technologies. At this moment, Ontoforce already has conducted some preliminary studies supported by IWT and IBBT. They have studied a multitude of possible architectures and existing examples of faceted browsers and caching of big semantically enabled datasets. Multimedia Lab is assisting the research of possible architectures and looking for the perfect combination of performance and functionalities.
A faceted browser
A faceted browser allows the user to browse or search content by applying multiple filters. As opposed to a taxonomic order, where everything is ordered in a tree structure, the ordering can be arbitrary. An example of this is Aquabrowser, the system used for the catalogue of the library of Ghent.
What I’m doing
While Multimedia Lab is researching the back end of the application, I’m researching the front end. I’m working bottom-up and they are working top-down, in order to meet each other in the middle. This week I’ve been reading trough the research Ontoforce already conducted and I’ve been doing some extra research myself. This allowed me to form an image of the application. Looking at existing faceted browsers, I’ve been writing down elements I really liked. Based on all that, I have put together a set of wireframes that depict the application and all of it’s functions.
Friday afternoon I attended a call with the people of Lucene. They develop open-source search software on top of Solr. The call was organized because Multimedia Lab is considering using Lucene in their architecture. The goal of the meeting was finding out the added value of Lucene, compared to Solr. I’ve learned a lot about how the software works and what they’re aiming at. It was a really technical meeting, but also really enriching.
What I’m planning to do
Friday, I received feedback on my wireframes and some more research from the side of Ontoforce. Next week I’ll be going trough all that info, picking up the new ideas and I will change my wireframes accordingly.
Thanks
Finally I want to thank iRail, Ontoforce and Multimedia Lab for giving me this opportunity. I’ve already learned a lot and I’m planning on continuing this in the coming weeks.
#iSoc12 tip&skip
Hello, Sjimi is my nickname; Dimitri Roose is my real name and I’m currently working on a project sponsored by Go-Mobile.
It came to be called ‘tip&skip’ and I’ll try to shape the general idea behind this proof of concept.
Project vision
First of all this is a proof of concept base approach to an SMS ticketing platform and/or application. The proof of concept will show to which extent this project can be realised and if so the possibilities should be unveiled.
The main goal is to provide a platform where mobile payment services are offered. The platform should ease the process of acquiring such SMS tickets. Examples of such tickets are those provided by De Lijn, NMBS or 4411 parking tickets.
In general there are two thought processes; buying via one’s mobile phone or buying for a phone from a computer at distance.
Buying from one’s mobile phone (BfP)
When people buy SMS tickets they do this mostly because they lacked the time to buy a ‘real’ ticket in advance or just don’t have the time anymore to buy one. Maybe the ‘ticketeer’ is short in cash but he decides to use the money on his phone instead, again probably just in time before he needs the ticket.
Therefore the main priority is speed and usability. Mostly no extra data is necessary to acquire such a ticket. A one-click-does-it-all approach should be envisioned.
Buying for a phone from a computer (BfC)
The purpose is somewhat different when buying an SMS-ticket from your computer which is to be sent to your phone. This will mostly be used when planning your trip beforehand. The ‘ticketeer’ would be able to avoid the hassle of buying a ‘real’ ticket.
Wireframe BfP
I’ve worked out the wireframe for the BfP approach on paper and I’m currently constructing a prototype responsive web application from the wireframe which I hope to blog about soon!
#iSoc12 FlatTurtle, the zookeepers
Since open data is becoming more and more popular we can start developing our own creative applications using that data. FlatTurtle does exactly that. It is a system that has a special turtle for each type of data. There is a turtle that likes train data, there is one that likes airplane data and there is a turtle that likes twitter. Combine all of these turtles together and you get a nice visualisation of that data.
If you are the owner of a building that attracts a lot of people and you want to inform your visitors of what is going on around this area, you can put all of these turtles on a nice big screen. Data about public transport, twitter mentions, weather perils, and so on, suddenly become the hot spot of your building.
Pieter Colpaert en Bart Rosseau study the FlatTurtle screen at iRail Summer of code.
Future
You like these turtles, and you want to play with them? No problem, soon there will be a mobile application to control all the turtles on the screen. Say you want to see what the weather forecast will be for the next hours, with the touch of a button you can call a turtle that will display this information on the screen.
How?
iRail loves API’s so why not create one ourselves. Everything you do on the mobile application sends messages to our Control Bay telling it what you want to do. Our Control Bay will then translate your command and send it to the right screen.
The team
#iSoc12 Code9000 presents: Take a look inside
After almost one week of meeting interesting people, we had to pitch all our ideas that we had. We came up with 7 ideas and actually, they were all interesting to work out. But because of the lack of time, the city of Ghent together with others, had to pick one. Finally the decision was made and we agreed that the project for the coming two weeks will be ‘Take A Look Inside’. If you are interested in the other ideas we pitched, take a look at the slides.
Giving the presentation
What is ‘Take A Look Inside’?
The easiest way to explain is with a little example. You’re walking in the streets of the beautiful city of Ghent. You’re looking around and you see all kinds of beautiful old respected buildings. But sometimes they aren’t accessible for visitors. Don’t you want to know what’s behind the walls? Didn’t you ever wanted to know what the building looks like at the inside? We came with a solution.
How does it work?
Take A Look Inside will place QR-codes in front of the building. You can scan the codes with your smartphone or tablet. You will be referred to a little video clip that creates the atmosphere of the building. You don’t want to watch the video at this moment? No problem, you can look at it later.
At this moment?
At this moment we are creating the information architecture. What do we want in our application? What should our application look like? Which platforms should be supported? All these kinds of questions are taking their form right now. The database design is figured out because this will provide the data for the application.
That’s about it for now. We’ll keep you posted!
The code9000 team
This post was also published on Apps For Ghent.
#iSoc12 The DataTank
Hello fellow earthlings, my name is Jan Vansteenlandt and I’m currently working on The DataTank together with Jeroen Penninck.
The DataTank is a lightweight data publishing platform written in PHP. The purpose of The DataTank is to open up data without taking over control of the data. In fact, The DataTank will never save your data in the framework itself but it will, however, save meta-data about the resources it has to open. The true use for end-users of The DataTank is that they can access static files, such as CSV, XLS, SHP, etc. through a RESTful API built on those dataresources. App developers, for example, won’t have to bother anymore about downloading that darn Excel file over and over again, parsing it and using it in their app. That medieval way of working is over, as they can now open it up with The DataTank and access those files with a RESTful webcall.
The above explains in a nutshell what The DataTank’s purpose is, so what are we working on right now? Well, at the time of writing I’m working on adding a database resource so that datatables in a specific database can be opened up and accessed through a RESTful API. Next to that I’m also enriching the data of the Gentse Feesten by adding the longitude and latitude of the events to the CSV-file that is available on the open data websection of the city of Ghent, and making that data available through a RESTful call.
Jeroen is working on abstracting the filter layer of The DataTank. The purpose of this is to make filtering data much more efficient, and uniform. Currently all filtering is being done on PHP objects in memory. However if the user passes along an SQL filter for an SQL resource for example, this filter could be handled more efficiently if the SQL is handled by the SQL engine itself.
We’ve only been going at our tasks for 5 days now, and a lot of work is still ahead of us, yet the unique atmosphere iSoc12 has will get us there, of that I am sure!