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fantastic-life

Listed below are comments made by fantastic-life between Saturday, 6th September 2008 and Monday, 23rd March 2009.

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Designing for your least able user 11:07am on 23 Mar 2009 Hi John. An S5 version is now available linked from the top of the post. Apologies for my previous laziness. I'll bring up your Flash comments at the next IA meeting...
Designing for your least able user 08:12am on 19 Mar 2009 @johndrinkwater Hi John. I think preaching is a little strong and certainly not the intention. I can appreciate why you'd object to flash from a free software perspective and why you'd object to flash from an accessibility perspective but in this case there's nothing in the flash that isn't in the post. How would you prefer to see the presentation? Plain text, html transcript, s5, something else?
In Search of Cultural Identifiers 11:33am on 16 Jan 2009 @LibraryThingTim - my bad on amazon thing. i saw the amazon mention, did some compartive search which returned very similar results and assumed you were using amazon as the spine of your data. good to know you're not. good luck with the competition : ) i've updated the post to reflect.
i've come across frbr in the Music Ontology which we use to publish linked data from the /music site. my desk mate Yves is far more of an expert but i appreciate the difficulties
i like the "cocktail party test". there's no perfect model for this but i think your solution will get a long way there.
i tried to mail you today but no response so far. would love to chat about this. usual first_name.last_name@bbc.co.uk if ur interested

@cping500 - i think uv misunderstood. what we're trying DESPERATELY to avoid is to make a website that refects "the way broadcasters think". broadcasters think in terms of assets and time slots. we put in a lot of effort (user testing, focus groups, conversations like this) to try to model how non-broadcasters think. we don't always get it right but that's our intention
hypertext does free you from hierarchical and linear impositions but to make hypertext you need links and to make links you need relationships. unless we know the relationship between the penguin edition and the penguin classic edition we can't make those links
we're not talking about "an appropriate account" - we're talking about documents which describe and uris which identify
if you want to identify an episode from a kundera novel you also need to identify that it comes from the kundera novel to give context. but it doesn't /just/ come from the pengin edition...

@samdutton - agreed. it would be stupid to try to replicate (wiki|db)pedia. it does a good enough job of describing a large part of the world. we just want to comprehensively cover *things the bbc is interested in* and we want to link all that stuff up. an example: we currently publish a page for every artist in musicbrainz. but we only link to those that the bbc has an interest in (those we've played or reviewed etc). because other artists aren't linked to the only way to find them is to hack the url which means google can't find them so they're not really on the web. we're not trying to steal page rank or become an encyclopedia of everything - just better represent and make findable the diversity of bbc (mainly broadcast) content

@esummers - interesting post. the freebase work in this area is really cool.
and yes machine readable open data would be fantastic. thanks for the link to the lod mailing list post. i'd missed that. open book data on the lod cloud would be totally, completely amazing. espeacially if the frbr work pays off. open library definitely *get it*

@mmmmmrob - again you're right. the context of the discussion tends to emphasise either the work or the expression. and (very?) occasionally the manifestation. as you say the bbc is broad church so often the work is the thing we're most interested in. thanks for the link

@isldlisld - thanks for the links. i'm liking worldcat. are u uk based? would be good to chat about this sometime. also how is the data licenced?

@jetski - i'm not sure the issue is more complicated in music... isn't it just complicated everywhere? the music ontology maps music frbr style with works, performances, sounds, recordings and signals. maybe it's because i spend more time thinking about music than books but books definitely feel more complicated to me. i hope to never have to model the bible. or after a conversation with a colleague today hamlet. again thanks for the link - never seen inside there - very interesting

@everyone - thanks for all the comments. it would make a fascinating pub chat :)
In Search of Cultural Identifiers 8:31pm on 14 Jan 2009 @setoub - that's very cool :)
michael
In Search of Cultural Identifiers 7:01pm on 14 Jan 2009 @david - agreed. i can't think of a way for machines to solve this problem. it has to come down to human intervention. maybe they'll offer a way for users to group publications. and as you say, it is in all other respects excellent

@amcewen - would love to come along but the penguin blog seems to indicate it's fully booked

@frankie - we are working with dbpedia people to provide a semweb complient controlled vocabulary for the bbc - more soon

@frankie + @ickbinberliner - LibraryThing is also very good and does appear to have solved this problem. but i'm not sure how their data is licenced. maybe i'm missing something but i'm only seeing copyright not creative commons... if i register and add data is that my data or LibraryThing's or open?

@ickbinberliner - yes, mixes are important for specialist shows. i'm not saying u shouldn't model down to this level. just that it's important to be able to group at a more abstract level. also a lot of the music we play is specifically edited for radio or even specially mixed for a dj. so it's a completely different signal even from that played on other shows. you've basically got a song. which is performed, which is recorded, which is mixed, which is then FURTHER edited for playout. it's an extra level of detail that stretches even the music ontology...

Michael
Taking the Proms to the semantic web in 10% time 09:24am on 27 Sep 2008 Hi Karl

I intend to make the rails code available for download from the site. However, I'm not the world's greatest coder so I'm not sure it will contribute much to the world.

On the associations question I tend not to use either HABTM or HMT. I've found that adding these associations tends to make me lazy in views and I end up with pages using 100 queries when one will do. I try to write a maximum of two queries a page: one to get the thing, one to get the things under the thing. Although I have broke this on work listing pages (http://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:2840/works/a-z/a) where there's a separate query for each work to get the composer(s). Since a work can have many composers and each composer has many fields that make up their display name, I haven't been clever enough to work out a better query. It does make these pages very slow!

Anyway, in general I like to be able to see my sql and find associations hide it and make me laz(y|ier).

Hope this helps. Code will follow when the application has some semblance of shape.

Michael
Taking the Proms to the semantic web in 10% time 09:14am on 27 Sep 2008 Hi 8violas

The intention is to make this data available in the new /events site under which all music events will sit (proms, glastonbury, electric proms etc).
Taking the Proms to the semantic web in 10% time 1:56pm on 07 Sep 2008 @trampus - thanks for spotting. is fixed now. must learn to type one day ;-)
Taking the Proms to the semantic web in 10% time 9:15pm on 06 Sep 2008 Hi metanoize

*none* of the links would have worked between 8pm and 9pm because I was redeploying the application. Apologies. Is back now.

If you want to know when the app is down and when new features are added please follow @historicalproms on twitter:

https://twitter.com/historicalproms/
Taking the Proms to the semantic web in 10% time 10:47am on 06 Sep 2008 Hi melopt

I haven't actually got permission to open this data under a cc licence yet. If/when I do I suspect it'll be a cc non-commercial licence since that's what the other bbc linked data is released under.

As far as I understand (and I'm not a freebase expert) their data is released under cc attribution. ie for commercial and non-commercial use. Which would be more liberal than our data licence. Also I think their attribution is back to freebase so we'd lose BBC attribution.

So, erm, probably not.........

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