Wikicompany

Semantic tagging coming along

April 17, 2006 on 4:08 pm | In semweb, wikicompany, semanticweb, usability, tagging, rss | No Comments

Part of the transition from categories to semantic tags is now done on Wikicompany.

See the tags on these examples: Full Sail Brewing, VNU, Atos Origin

The tag browsing interface is still primitive, but because of the REST web service, a RSS feed with detailed info is available for each company, so many more details can be presented (logo, other tags, phone numbers, subsidiaries, etc).

Even mediawiki extensions can be used within the tag interface, as can be seen in the examples. This really shows the power of a good wiki platform, instead of a traditional CMS.

Semantic tagging todo's:

• A commandline tool to extract the semantic relations from every article and dump these into the SMW tables.
• The new company input form should register semantic annotations automatically.
• A more usable interface for browsing tags, with dynamic filters
  • Better usability when searching and browsing tag-sets. Something like the ShopWiki page styles seems nice.
  • Move to REST URLs and services for the tag browse interface
  • Uniform multi-word tag input / output (not often needed, but still important)
  • A "related tags" function (based on the graph analyis of tags)
  • Flickr and delicious tag integration ("show the 5 most interesting pictures and links belonging to this set of tags"). Open web services are simply delicious.
  • Google maps rendering of companies per tag-set? I'm actually thinking to redo some of the geo interfaces on Wikicompany. Eg. provide a full-screen browse interface, in addition to the normal gmap view.

Another project I'm working on is a web crawler for creating company profiles from just a URL. Not an easy task, but very interesting work. Since the amount of user contributions is currently very low, this may provide a way to get many more free company profiles.

Mainpage cleaning & AJAX

February 20, 2006 on 2:01 am | In wikicompany, features, usability, ajax | No Comments

I’ve been re-styling the mainpage of Wikicompany to put more focus on important and interesting elements (see screenshot below).

Next up will be an AJAX-style interface for searching, publishing and browsing.

The search interface will be a simple company / sector / region input-form. Later, an additional advanced search form will be created, with optional RSS/Atom output, to start using the semantical annotations.

The publishing interface will be written in the form of a Specialpage, with pseudo multi-page forms, auto-suggests, and more  web2.0 ingredients.

The browsing interface is pretty much there already, but some things could be probably be improved (at the cost of performance). What would be cool, would be a dynamic filtering interface when browsing in the category tree.