The free access to public domain data seems to be more real and live with the Internet advent. However, in practice we lack of tools to find and to access this data. As described by Elings & Waible, the community of libraries, archives and museums have been working hardly over the past decades to create and to implement methods and tools to achieve full integration of the available content. The efforts consist to create metadata (data about the content), descriptive standards, and protocols to share (exchange) content. Based on this work I wonder better opportunities for end-users (us) of these systems.

I admit, my archive is almost a mess. I am still trying to find a good organizing methodology for my digital files. Basically, it is a trial and error method with many interactions until now. Many specialists have expended their lives doing the same thing, and they have the “know-how”. The question is: how can I borrow this expertise from them? I could learn the metadata, protocols, and almost become a professional in this field. It is a very high time consuming. But what if I have a system that encode this expertise and help me to organize my archive? Yes, I don’t want to learn biblioteconomy and documentation; what I want is an end-user friendly system to archive digital files. The system should support a very good way in helping me to find categories and key words to index my files. It should help me to store and to find content in a natural and flexible way. And it should be flexible enough to be customizable and extensible with new functionalities.

Another thing that I would love to have is a truly free access to public domain data. It is like what we can get from Wikipedia, and google scholars, and google books. I want more than what is available now, like a smart system that can find things that I like based on the files that I have. It is a suggestion system based on my personal archive.

In conclusion, the museums, libraries and archives have a mature set of tools and protocols to represent, store, and exchange content. It is still a hot and evolving topic among these societies, but there are enough definitions to create system to expose the content on the web. It is time to start the creation of systems to enable end-users to work on this domain. It is on my todo list. =)

I have a lot of extraordinary friends. They’re awesome and I learn a lot with them by exciting discussions through email about many assorted and interesting topics. I was wondering what if I could put all these conversations online such way other people could take advantage of that.

While I was thinking about this problem, I found that the knowledge representation is a hard problem and there’s a discipline only to study that, called Knowledge Management.

As time goes by, I am more pragmatic about applying all this science in my daily life. So, after some talk to my friends and loosely define our community, I started to think about the technology to implement this. Some results from my initial research include that blog is inappropriate to store knowledge that can evolve, and the best system for that is Wiki. Twitter s*cks. RSS is very cool and to create a mashup is a great way to spread the word (we don’t need twitter). Forum boards are an appropriate place to discussions, but most of users need to receive alert by emails – they go to their mail box, but don’t go to forum system without a reason.

Even very good willing people don’t have time to spend reading long and boring text, and nobody has time to moderate a community. The solution we found is to create a closed community to post information for a public audience.

We are still settling down our systems and rules. It requires a lot of time, but I hope we can just start something meaningful that we can use later. It’s a sparkle for a better way to spend our time online and share information. I hope that the know-how of this project can be used to help other people to manage their knowledge in a digital way, so they can reuse in other to create more sophisticate systems to help with their daily tasks. More information about it is coming soon.

b-day agent project is not going well. After the good start with the facebook application, I got stuck in the orkut rules. It’s so easy and exciting to create application for facebook, but the google way is so hard and boring. The worst and more frustrating was to find that orkut doesn’t provide you an interface to extract birthday from your contact list. Instead of that, you can create a calendar mark in your Google Calendar and see everything there. It’s so pathetic that Google has to lock up the user data and obligate the users to use its suite. Google can do better than it.
b-day agent need to be smarter know to extract daya from Google Calendar, but I think that it’s too much effort for a toy application. Project is suspended by now. When I have my easy way to create agents, I come back to work on it.

Today I start a class about presentation skills – thanks to YWCA.. Talking about it with a good fella, Joeri Kiekebosch, I took notice about a great site to build presentations http://prezi.com. I also reached a piece of advice in the mastering the art of good presentation, a kind of anti-patterns of PowerPoint. Check this out at http://www.sethgodin.com [Free PDF available].

Nowadays, there are several social network applications available on the web. Some of these social network has a specific propose to gathering people, others are just general propose and competing for the user attention. For example, my favorite social applications are Facebook (helps you connect and share with the people in your life), Orkut (Connect with friends and family, Discover new people through friends of friends and communities, Share your videos, pictures, and passions all in one place), and LinkedIn (Stay informed about your contacts and industry, Find the people & knowledge you need to achieve your goals, Control your professional identity online). In these systems, people share information freely, with restriction about privacy, but there is lack of a common interface to use the available data o build new systems.

Motivation
People are creating and maintaining great data sources of social information. These data are available in different systems. However, there’s no way to build new systems to use this data split among all these sites. E.g., you moved to a new city and are looking for friends living close to you. All this data should be available to the user, so it support the development of new application, like personal agents to help users in specific tasks.

Goal
Build a common sense platform to extract data from social network web applications. The data will be available to support the development of new application, like personal agents to help users in specific tasks.

Methodology
Create a multi-agent system platform. Each social network application has an agent that knows how to extract information from the web application database. There’s an aggregated database that stores minimal information about users contacts (e.g. ids in the different systems.)

New applications can use the social network agents to get information, or just use a proxy agent that access all the other agents looking for the requested data (e.g. address, birthday, skills, work).

In the future the agents can evolve to support actions. They will be sensor and actuators working in the user behalf. The users can use them to create more sophisticated applications, so transforming the social networks from toy web apps into work web apps.

A cool example of how this application can be used is a birthday remainder. This is the subject of the b-day agent application. I’ll talk more about it soon.

I’m engaged in many communities and forums discussing stuff that matters – like Slashdot but not only for nerds. Bright friends contribute with opinions and new links for other points of view. I was looking for a better way to share it in such way the information is not restricted to the discussion forums. During my quest to solve this problem, the system pligg appeared and I’ve settled Infodude. Feel free to participate:

http://darlinton.net/infodudes