The SIMILE Blog

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.

A digitized portion of MIT Libraries’ Rotch Visual Collections - a large architectural image collection - is browsable using a DWell configuration of Longwell at:

Longwell RVC Demo

Noteworthy are the use of RVC’s native VRA Core metadata, specially designed Fresnel lenses for modeling the VRA work/image hierarchy, and a new grid view in Longwell providing a ‘light table’ presentation of image thumbnails.

Please note that the full-resolution images are currently restricted to members of the MIT community. If you have similar needs, check out the code in our SVN repository:

http://simile.mit.edu/repository/longwell-demos/rvc

Special thanks to Ryan Lee, Carl Jones of MIT Libraries, and the RVC staff.

Appalachian, an OpenID add-on for Firefox 2.x, is now available for download. Please see the Appalachian home page for more information and for ways you can assist in its development.

Please note that Appalachian 1.1 is incompatible with prior releases to accommodate more of the OpenID specifications.

While David goes to WWW2007, Stefano goes to ApacheCON EU 2007 in Amsterdam. He’ll be giving two presentations:

• A “no-nonsense” introduction to semantic web technologies where he’ll be demoing software from the SIMILE project
• Community Building Practices

See you there!

WWW 2007 is in less than 2 weeks! If you’re going, let me know! I’m there from Tuesday night until Friday afternoon.

Come to my talk on Exhibit (Friday morning), or at least check out these exhibits made just for the conference:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/projects/www-conferences/www-conferences.html

Many thanks to Carey Williamson and Christopher Gutteridge for the XML data!

One of our servers’ video card fried and took the machine down and we could not get it back up.  We were afraid it would take much longer, but it was all done very quickly by our awesome sysadmin Alex. Many thanks! He also took this as an opportunity to consolidate our infrastructure by moving this server in the same rack with the other ones (previously, was in another building… don’t ask). Please let us know if you experience any problems with our technical infrastructure.

Please bear with us while we repair part of our infrastructure. We don’t have a firm date on when the affected services will be available again, but we’ll keep you posted. Thanks for your patience.

We released Exhibit two and a half months ago, and yesterday we checked to see what people have exhibit-ized. Here is an abbreviated list, in no particular order:

1. Sports cars with photos
   
2. Yummy recipes
3. Apartments
4. The Revolutionary War
5. Radio albums
6. Army cavalry officers
7. Breweries and Distilleries in Ontario 1914 - 1915
8. Conference speakers
9. The International Phonetic Alphabet
10. Conference tutorials
11. Playscripts
12. 1871 tavern keepers in Huron county
13. Dogs

and then… this may (will) blow up your browser: Lego.

To the authors of these exhibits: Thank you for using our software! If you don’t want us to link to your exhibits, please let us know and we will remove the link in this blog post immediately.