Playground is the one place to go for sharing your data on the web the way you want to.

About Playground

Building on years of experience gained working on our tools, Playground combines several technologies into one coherent whole, providing users the ability to upload and publish their data - anywhere on the web - with a minimal amount of work and no need for prior experience with the underlying technologies.

Anonymous users can upload any data recognized by Playground, which automatically re-presents it to the user in the form of an Exhibit. The result can be configured live, perhaps by adding a Timeline view to the presentation, using one of several display templates to suit their needs. When finished, the configuration is saved, and the resulting Exhibit can be shown to the public for a limited time. To extend the time indefinitely, a user merely needs to log in and claim their playground, using either OpenID or email for identification, before it expires.

Publishing the final Exhibit can be accomplished by downloading an HTML file and uploading it to the web.

Building on Playground

Citation Commons is a rebranding of Playground at MIT for assisting the web publication of bibliographies. MIT researchers can upload BibTeX files - generated by EndNote, Zotero, or hand curated - to the Citation Commons site and publish the resulting Exhibit with the rest of their personal faculty web pages. For example, see MacKenzie Smith's bibliography.

Live Demos

Coming soon. Stay tuned. In lieu of a demo, take a quick walk through screenshots of the process.

Architecture

Playground combines several tools from SIMILE's projects over the years. The modular pipelining framework of Butterfly underlies everything, with the data conversion from Babel and our experience with RDF stores and OpenID used as modules within the Playground server-side application.

The front end presented to users is based on AJAX calls in combination with Butterfly's Javascript continuations. Much of the user facing code is built on jQuery.

Code

Server-side components of Playground are written in Java and Javascript, user-facing components in Javascript. All of the code can be found in our repository. As Playground is more of a service than a packaged product, we are not focusing heavily on developer support. You should still contact us on our General mailing list if you have questions or contributions regarding the code base.

Legal and Licensing Issues

Playground is open source software and is licensed under a BSD-style license.

Note that although Playground depends on various libraries for its operation, no external library is distributed bundled with it (all the dependencies are downloaded by maven).

Credits

This software was created and is maintained by The SIMILE Project and in particular:

• Stefano Mazzocchi <stefanom at mit.edu>
• David Huynh <dfhuynh at csail.mit.edu>
• Ryan Lee <ryanlee at csail.mit.edu>