The SIMILE Blog

And you don’t need to change a thing. It gives me great pleasure to inform you that your existing timeplots should simply function, now, when you browse to them in Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Go ahead, go and look, maybe give it a shift-reload to clear that now-untrue incompatibility message. Or visit Timeplot’s page and look over those examples once more.

Thanks to Stefano’s intentional design around canvas and his clean implementation, using ExplorerCanvas to broaden Timeplot’s reach was mostly a finishing touch. Some caveats: transparency effects will not work, and it’s on the slow side compared to other browsers, which is perhaps why mouse value tracking is not as smooth as with other browsers.

Credit is due to Sarfaraz Rydhan for submitting patches that would have accomplished much the same thing, and we certainly would have accepted them had we not just had the same thought. Thanks, Sarfaraz, and thanks to our other contributors who continue to help us improve on Timeplot.

Our project offers quite a diverse toolkit of more than a dozen tools. And these tools are at different levels of maturity. Consequently, sometimes it can be hard for people other than our team to understand how all of these pieces fit together into a coherent, compelling story. Once in a while, we need to step back from the code editor and turn to the blog to put down in words where we are really heading with all that code…

Here is my attempt at doing that: I have written up this wiki page to document how we ourselves have used several of our tools to automate the scraping of the official MIT course catalog web site and provide better browsing features on the same data that it contains:

before	after
click the images to see the sites

The tools used include Solvent, Crowbar, Juggler, Exhibit, and Timegrid. (Juggler and Timegrid are still not yet officially released. You can use them at your own risk.) See this wiki page for more details.

Note that our scraping tools (Solvent and Crowbar) let you deal with web pages at the level of the DOM (e.g., evaluating XPaths, retrieving HTML attributes) rather than at the level of streaming characters. This higher level of abstraction is easier to operate in. Furthermore, Solvent and Crowbar can wait for all the dynamic Javascript code in web pages to finish running; this means that you can even scrape those new Web 2.0 sites rather than just static web pages.

Secondly, in the tools used in this particular scenario, you code in only Javascript rather than a hodgepodge of languages (Perl, Python, etc.). Perhaps this uniformity helps lower the barrier to web app makeovers.

We are continually making our tools easier to use. But hopefully they are already useful and usable to many of our target users right now. If you have similar scenarios using our tools, please share with us! Thanks!

Yesterday I got my hand on an OLPC XO

and I tried to load Exhibit onto its browser. And it worked!

That’s the Presidents exhibit running with both map and timeline views! This would be pretty delightful if kids can generate these visualizations themselves about whatever topics that interest them, or whatever issues that are pressing in their worlds, much like this exhibit about contaminated cities in Spain. Here is that same exhibit on the XO:

And of course, to Semantic Web researchers like myself, it is delightful to see RDF showing up on the XO (through Exhibit’s Export feature):

Gabe and I are happy to announce the availability of Wibbit 1.0 beta, a MediaWiki extension for creating exhibits inside wiki pages.

http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Wibbit

Please try it out and let us know what you think!

- Margaret and Gabe

MiniZeitgeist is a plugin for WordPress that tracks your daily Akismet spam comment activity and plots it out for you using Timeplot, similar in appearance to the overall Akismet Spam Zeitgeist.

Visit the MiniZeitgeist page for more on how to obtain and install the plugin.

I’m happy to announce the release of the latest versions of Piggy Bank and Appalachian, now bundled together for your convenience. This latest revision of Piggy Bank begins a shift in architecture to separate out browser components from storage components by moving the ‘Publish’ action into the browser; see the wiki for details. It also introduces the ability to utilize Appalachian’s OpenID API for publishing, thus the bundle. Piggy Bank is still backwards compatible with the older method of publishing to a Semantic Bank using usernames and passwords.

The new bundle itself will not provide any updates; each add-on will get updates on its own. If you’ve never installed either, the bundle is the way to go. For the many of you who have Piggy Bank but not Appalachian, see the wiki for download and installation instructions. The new Piggy Bank will still function without Appalachian, but it will complain less once Appalachian is installed. The new Appalachian fixes a number of bugs; in particular, all of its network calls are now asynchronous to avoid locking up your browser while waiting for a response.

If you have either installed, Firefox should be informing you of an update. Otherwise, you can get the bundle here:

http://simile.mit.edu/dist/piggy-bank-bundle/piggy-bank-bundle.xpi

If you have any issues with installation or upgrading, please read over the Piggy Bank Troubleshooter (particularly the parts on upgrade issues) before letting us know through our mailing list or our issue tracker.

You may be asking what good a Piggy Bank with OpenID authenticated publishing really is without a corresponding OpenID-enabled Semantic Bank. Well, stay tuned…

On behalf of the Simile team, our summer Haystack interns, and our contributors, I’m happy to announce the availability of Exhibit 2.0 (beta):

http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit/

Check out the examples to understand the significant changes in this version.

Useful links:
What’s new: http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit/2.0_Release
Migrating from 1.0 to 2.0: http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit/2.0/Migration

The SIMILE development team is happy to announce the availability of Timeplot, a DHTML Ajaxy widget use to plot time series.

Timeplot extends our existing Timeline widget to provide the ability to overlay time series over existing Timeline event data. Follow the link to the Timeplot home page to see several examples of that.

Timeplot is based on <canvas> and currently works on Firefox 2.x/3.x, Camino, Safari 3.x and Opera 9.x. Safari 2 and IE6/7 are not currently supported but support for them in planned for the next releases.

Just like Timeline, Timeplot requires no software installation and also follows an API style that will feel familiar to web developers that already embedded Timeline in their pages.

Happy plotting!

On behalf of the SIMILE team, I’m announcing the availability of Potluck (beta) for trying out. Potluck allows casual users to mash-up data on the web using direct manipulation and simultaneous editing techniques:

http://simile.mit.edu/potluck/

Please try it out and send us your comments. Note that Firefox is the browser of choice and IE support is limited. This is research software so beware of bugs

For the academically-inclined:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/research/papers/iswc2007-potluck.pdf

David

There are times where it’s a little frustrating to see all your tools used and very little to come back, but today is not one of those days.

Tom Woodward (a former english and history teacher) has produced an incredibly detailed audio/video tutorial to bring teachers up-to-speed in using Exhibit in their classrooms and we were so impressed by it that we linked to it directly from the Exhibit home page (of course, after asking him if this was ok and if he could handle the bandwidth load).

On behalf of the entire SIMILE Project, I would like to thank Tom for making such a great resource available on the web.

We are looking forward to see the bunch of new exhibits that teachers will create for their classrooms.