Found a very cool looking set of tools tonight. From the SIMILE website, "SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services." And that they do. The first thing I looked at was Timeline, which is like a Google Maps for timelines. Very, very cool with a lot of potential for use.

Other tools include:

Longwell: faceted browsing for RDF data.

Piggybank: "Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension that turns your browser into a mashup platform, by allowing you to extract data from different web sites and mix them together."

As I'm going through the site, one of the things I'm thinking about (a lot) is the power this gives the users, the visitors to my website and other websites. Will big corporations fight it? Will those who embrace it (and talk to the people about how they want to get the data) be the ones to survive?

Moving on...

Solvent: - "Solvent is a Firefox extension that helps you write screen scrapers for Piggy Bank."

Gadget: "Gadget is an XML inspector. [sound of inspector gadget theme playing in the back]"

Hehe. A sense of humor is good. It's a tough world and it's nice to be able to laugh.

Welkin: "Welkin is a graph-based RDF visualizer."

Looks cool, but I can't think of any good uses off the top of my head.

Referee: - "Referee is a program that reads your web server logs and crawls your referrers (the links that point to your pages) and extract metadata from those pages and text around the links that pointed to your pages."

Hrm. Thoughts include acknowledgement that big corps don't really study data that much. (At least not many I knew during my stint on the inside...) This data is important, though. Following conversations that start about you on the web.

I was at lunch with my grandmother the other day and she told me she'd mentioned Muncie Free Press to someone and they'd already heard about it. Made me feel good. Can't hide that.

RDFizers: - "RDFizers are tools that allow to transform existing data into an RDF representation."

Can think of uses for this. Especially with November coming up. Hrm...

This is nifty:

• From University of Maryland - Mindswap's labs:
• XLS -> RDF
  - converts Microsoft Excel spreadsheets into RDF
• CSV -> RDF

  - conversts "comma-separated values" files into RDF.

The Timeline might be something I use.

From the site:

To guide the SIMILE effort we will focus on well-defined, real-world use cases in the libraries domain. Since parallel work is underway to deploy DSpace at a number of leading research libraries, we hope that such an approach will lead to a powerful deployment channel through which the utility and readiness of semantic web tools and techniques can be compellingly demonstrated in a visible and global community.

The SIMILE Project and its members are fully committed to the open source principles of software distribution and open development and for this reason, it releases the created intellectual property (both software and reports) under a BSD-style license. The SIMILE Project team members gladly welcome community efforts and would particularly like to recognize SIMILE's contributors.

Thoughts? Uses for any of these?

Technorati Tags: Cool Feature Editorial Online