The trained guinea pigs in the Wragge Labs bunker have been churning out all sorts of stuff in the last few months, and I’m way behind in my attempts to document their activities. So this is a bit of a catch-up post to try and commit a few pertinent details to the collective memory bank before they are lost forever in the sleep-deprived fog of day-to-day existence.

Identity upgrades

There have been a number of major improvements to Wragge’s Identity Browser. Regular viewers will recall that the Identity Browser is built on top of the People Australia SRU interface. You might not realise, however, that People Australia contains details of many organisations as well as people. We can only be thankful that it wasn’t called Entity Australia.

The first version of my Identity Browser only searched for people, but now all your corporate-entity-identification needs are also met, with only a few minor changes to the interface so-beloved by numerous generations of identity seekers. To be specific, through the wonders of drop-down technology you can choose whether you want to search for a person or an organisation. Or not. You can also just ignore that and search for everything and get back sensible results anyway. It’s your choice. Or not.

Gaze in awe at the power of my dropdown

Ah pattern matching… there are few phrases so redolent of warm summer days, hidden pleasures, and the subtle delights of wildcard characters. The People Australia SRU interface was sadly lacking in the pattern matching department, but this has now been rectified. So now you mix your stems and asterixes with wild abandon. Searching for ‘Curtin, J*’ will now retrieve all those Curtins whose names begin with ‘J’. Amazing isn’t it?

Astonishing too is the fact that the accompanying ‘Identify me!’ bookmarklet continues to function with nary a murmur of protest. There is, however, a little bit of cleverness built-in to enhance your bookmarklet experience. If the text that you highlight has a comma in it, the Identity Browser will conclude that you’re feeding it the name of a person – ie Surname, Firstname – and will treat the Firstname as a stem. So if you highlight ‘Whitlam, G’ and click on the bookmarklet, the Identity Browser will be kick-started into life, searching for everything that matches surname equals ‘Whitlam’ and firstname is like ‘G*’. If there’s no comma – ie firstname secondname – then it heads off to look for either a person whose surname equals ’secondname’ and whose firstname is like ‘firstname*’, or an organisation whose name includes both ‘firstname’ and ’secondname’. Got all that?

Basically the idea was to try and provide some sensible defaults so you really don’t have to think about it too much.

I have it in my head to prepare a long and rapturous homage to the wonders of machine tags. With their sly semantic ways and easy-going nature, they offer some exciting possibilities not just for user-generated content, but user-generated meanings and user-generated relationships. But for the full, ripe pleasure of that post you will have to wait another day, for now I shall simply say that as well as RDFa, the Identity Browser provides automagically-generated machine tags.

Where might you use them? Flickr’s a good place to start. Try identifying the subjects and creators of Flickr photos. At the NSW Reference and Information Services Group Seminar the other day I challenged those in attendance to go forth and machine tag. Already more than 100 machine tags have been added to Flickr using my Identity Browser. Expect to hear more about the Great Flickr Machine Tag Challenge soon…

One more thing… try adding ‘.rdf’ on to the end of an identity record – eg http://wraggelabs.com/identities/person/612109.rdf. Just an experiment at the moment…

More machine tag love

One night on Twitter, @lifeasdaddy pointed out that someone had started using fragments of urls from the NLA newspapers site as tags in the Powerhouse Museum’s collection database. In the conversation that ensued with @sebchan and others, I suggested that the PHM could encourage this sort of rich tagging by supporting machine tags, with all their wonderful juicy semantic goodness The guinea pigs got excited as well, and before I knew it, they’d constructed a little Semweb Helper app.

The Semweb Helper comes with its very own custom-tailored bookmarklet. If you find an article on the NLA newspapers site that you’d like to point to, just click on the bookmarklet and marvel as a range of useful machine tags are automagically generated. Then you just pick the appropriate tag, copy and paste et voila – instant semantic gratification.

Try out the Semweb Helper

It’s a very simple little app, and really just a demonstration of how semantic web technologies might be made available to the masses. It was also the first time the guinea pigs had been allowed to play with the Google Apps Engine.

Who am I?

This short catch-up post has become something quite long and rambling. Did I mention that I’m sleep-deprived? Anyway, a recent addition to the Wragge Labs range of lifestyle accessories is ‘Who am I?’ – a simple little game that is something like a cross between hangman and Wheel of Fortune. Choosing a person at random from People Australia and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, ‘Who am I?’ tests your powers of logic, stamina and historical guesstimation.

Your challenge is to figure out the surname of the mystery historical personage. To help you there are a series of clues, such as their birthplace and known associates. With each guess you also see a little bit more of their portrait. But beware! For ten wrong guesses are all that are permitted to any so brave as to enter upon this quest. Not eleven or twelve, but ten and ten only. To ignore this limit is to invite ridicule and disdain – do so at your peril.

Play Who am I?

‘Who am I’ builds upon some work I’ve been doing for the National Museum of Australia – looking at ways of mashing together various types of date-identified data. As part of that project I’ve built a series of APIs and have scraped, pummelled and munged data from a variety of sources.

What’s the point? I wonder this myself sometimes, particularly after I fling such things off into the aethernet and hear naught but a rare retweet. I am, after all, only in it for the glory, oh and the money of course. (Hmmm, I must look again at that business plan.) The point is twofold: first to highlight possibilities for the re-use and remixing of cultural data; second, to play with game-based models for discovery and exploration of cultural resources; and… err… thirdly just to try building something a little different.

Of course, if you like ‘Who am I?’ you will probably also want to try Headline Roulette…

Headline Roulette Reprieve

At the end of our last instalment, the future of Headline Roulette seemed in dire peril. Changes to the National Library of Australia web site threatened its very existence. Did it have a future? Could it survive? And did anybody care?

As we pick up the story oblivion looms. The feared changes are confirmed, but just as all seems lost… is it? Could it be? Yes, an advanced search facility is added to the newspapers site within Trove. Sensing this may be their only opportunity, the guinea pigs leap into action, building a new screen-scraper, saving Headline Roulette from doom, and setting the world upon the path to a safer, happier future.

In short, Headline Roulette will live on… so enjoy.

Handing out some presents

My head is easily turned by flattery and praise. Yes, I really am so shallow and so vain. But this means that if people say nice things to me, I’m inclined to give them presents.

As well as doing exciting things in the web 2.0 realm for the PROV, @asaletourneau leaves nice comments on this blog. So he earned himself a present. It’s not much, but I built a userscript that displays photos from the PROV site in a neat little slideshow (it’s the non-3D javascript version of CoolIris). Install Greasemonkey, get the userscript and try it out (just do a search, then click on the ‘Browse as slideshow’ button’).

PROV transport photos in a pretty slideshow

The State Library of NSW, or more specifically @ellenforsyth, also earned my favour by inviting me to rave on about Linked Data at the afore-mentioned NSW RISG seminar. As a result, I added support for the SLNSW photo collections to my Flickr Context Harvester userscript. Well… it’s the thought that counts, right? Once again – install Greasemonkey, get the userscript and then try it out.

The Flickr Context Harvester in action

And coming up…

Stay tuned for more on the Great Flickr Machine Tag Challenge, screencasts demonstrating my Identity Browser, some playing with relationships, and much much more. But right now the squirming baby on my lap needs a nappy change…

Did I mention that I’m sleep deprived?

Let me be clear. I am not Tim Sherratt the sound engineer. Nor, indeed, am I Timothy Sherratt, author of Saints as Citizens: A Guide to Public Responsibilities for Christians. We are three different people, spread across three continents, locked in a deadly battle for global supremacy via Google search rankings. There can be only one…

Of course you probably knew I wasn’t a British sound engineer or an American politics professor. There are plenty of contextual clues within this website, even on this page, to indicate that my interests lie elsewhere. But while we humans are pretty good at picking up such clues, it’s much harder for computers. When Google comes to index my site, how does it know I’m not a sound engineer who likes to dabble in history? Indeed, how does Google, or any computer know that the words ‘Tim Sherratt’ are actually a person’s name? These are questions of both identity and semantics.

Librarians have been dealing with questions of identity for many, many years developing detailed name authority records. Such records allow name variations to be cross-referenced and individuals to be uniquely identified. For example I have a control number of ‘n 2005043272′ in the Library of Congress authorities database, while Timothy R Sherratt, the politics professor has been assigned ‘n 94106739′.

The National Library of Australia has developed its own name authority file. However, the NLA has realised that reliable identity data has a much broader application that simply cataloguing, and is using its name authority data as the foundation of an exciting new resource – People Australia. People Australia will mesh its own records with biographical data from a variety of outside sources, creating a rich collection of interlinked identities. Already entries from the Australian Dictionary of Biography have been ingested.

So now, thanks to People Australia, if I ever get confused about who I am I just have to remember one little url – my very own persistent identifier – http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-479364. I’m going to get a t-shirt made up.

But that doesn’t help our new machine overlords very much. How can a computer tell that the words ‘Tim Sherratt’ describe a person and that more information about that person can be found at http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-479364? This is the sort of problem that the semantic web hopes to solve. The semantic web aims to expose the structures that are buried in our documents and databases, to make explicit the contextual clues that humans pick up, but computers ignore. As the slogan goes, it represents a change from a ‘web of documents to a web of data’.

The semantic web uses a variety of tools and standards to encode information in a form that means something to computers. FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is, for example, a machine-readable ontology that describes people and their relationships. A computer visiting this page can in fact find out a fair bit about me, including my NLA persistent identifier, because there is a link to a small XML file in which my details are expressed using FOAF.

But if this seems a little daunting, the semantic web offers another technology which is really just as easy as marking up a page in HTML – it’s called RDFa. This link – Tim Sherratt – is more than it seems. Here is what a computer sees:

<a typeof="foaf:Person" property="foaf:name" content="Sherratt, Tim" rel="foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf" href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-479364">Tim Sherratt</a>

This says that Tim Sherratt is a person whose name has the standard form ‘Sherratt, Tim’ and who is the primary topic of the page to be found at http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-479364. There’s a fair bit of semantic goodness in that one little link. If the NLA page also expressed its data in a machine-readable form, this link could send search engines and browsers into a whole new world of associations and inferences.

But I suppose you’re thinking that the code still looks a bit complicated. Well never fear, this long post is really just an introduction to a new project I’ve been working on – something that will help you generate markup like this with just a couple of clicks.

Introducing Wragge’s identity browser

I’ve been interested in publishing biographical data way back from the early days of Bright Sparcs and, sad as it may seem, I find the possibilities of People Australia pretty exciting. However, I don’t think we should expect the NLA to do all the work. People Australia provides a framework that we can all use to enrich our own documents, databases, finding aids, and applications.

You can easily access People Australia data through Trove. But to get a better idea of what’s in the database, I’d suggest you spend some time playing with its SRU interface. Using this you can query the database directly, retrieving results in XML – ready for your own application to suck up and use.

To make this even easier, I’ve written a People Australia client library in Python. This enables you to quickly extract and use identity information. Using it, your own web application can talk to People Australia directly. I won’t go into the details here – the code is farily heavily commented – but I welcome any feedback, suggestions or contributions. Copy it, change it, use it!

To try out my library and to provide a tool that might be of use to the average punter I’ve also built:

<TA-DA>Wragge’s identity browser!</TA-DA>

It’s pretty simple. Search for a surname, pick a name from the result list, and view their identity details. For example, here’s Clement Wragge’s details.

But there are a couple of extra features that I am rather smugly pleased with. First of all, there’s an 'Identify me!' bookmarklet. Just drag the link to your browser’s bookmarks or favourites toolbar (see below for some further notes).

Once you have the bookmarklet installed all you have to do to find the identity record for someone is to highlight their name on a webpage and click ‘Identify me!’. You could then grab the People Australia ID to store in your own application, allowing you (with the help of my client library) to automatically include links to relevant entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, for example.

Even better, Wragge’s identity browser will automagically generate the RDFa markup you need to semantically enrich your document. Whether you’re writing a blog post, publishing an article, drafting a caption, creating a database entry, or preparing a finding aid you can quickly and easily find an individual and then cut and paste the code you need.

To show this in action I used the bookmarklet to help me mark up many of the people named in one of my articles. We humans see a normal page with a few extra links. Computers, however, can extract the embedded RDFa to get at the structured information that’s hidden in the page.

Now I’ve got to go and semantify the rest of my articles…

Go forth and identify! And in the process help build a better web.

Notes on the bookmarklet

• Internet Explorer has ‘Favorites’, Firefox has ‘Bookmarks’ – whatever you’re using first make sure that your Bookmarks/Favourites toolbar is visible. Look under Tools->Toolbars in IE8, View->Toolbars in Firefox.
• Try dragging the ‘Identify me!’ link to your Bookmarks/Favourites toolbar. If it doesn’t work, try right clicking on the link and choose ‘Bookmark this link’ or ‘Add to Favourites’. Make sure you add it to the toolbar folder. IE will probably give you various warnings – ignore them.
• You should now have a working bookmarklet – highlight a name and click on it, a new window should open with results from Wragge’s identity browser. IE might complain about opening a pop-up – allow pop-ups and try again.
• The bookmarklet is pretty clever about working out which part of the highlighted text is the surname, so you can highlight names in a number of formats including:
  • Surname
  • Surname’s
  • Surname, Othernames
  • Othernames Surname
  • Othernames Surname’s
• For the moment this only works with ’straight’, ie non-curly, apostrophes – but I’ll fix this asap. Fixed!

Notes on RDFa markup

• You have a choice between visible (ie clickable) links or invisible ones. They look the same to computers, so it’s just a matter of whether you want your human visitors to see them. Click ‘change’ to toggle between the two options.
• You can just paste the RDFa markup straight into your document. If you’ve used the bookmarklet, the text you highlighted will be automatically inserted as the link text – so just copy and paste. If you haven’t used the bookmarklet you can insert the link text yourself.
• Somewhere in your document you need to tell computers what the FOAF in your RDFa markup means. You do this by inserting the text:
  xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" inside a tag that contains your marked up text. If you can edit the raw html of your page, you can just insert it in the <html> tag itself, so it becomes <html xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" >. Otherwise you can wrap your marked up text in a <div> tag and put the extra code in there.
• If you’re using something like Wordpress that strips out or converts any markup that it doesn’t expect, you need to be able to enter the RDFa as ‘raw’ html. In Wordpress you can do this using the Raw HTML plugin.
• For more on using RDFa have a look at: RDFa for HTML Authors.