Semantosoph

Everywhere you go, always take your topic with you

Ever since I saw an embedded YouTube-Video, I’m fascinated with the idea of employing my browser for bringing data from different sources together automatically. Of course, the Linking Open Data initiative has made great success in structuring and combining large amounts of data. But that blending always happens on the server side and the user has no influence on what kind or what amount of linked data I may see in my browser.

To achieve a more user friendly experience, the benefits from the field of publicly available data storing should be combined with the idea of the embeddable video. That is, bringing small parts of public open data to the user in an easily embeddable form. And to bring this one step further, an user should not only be able to embed public data, but to create embeddable widgets of his own structured data, too.

Having said this, I’m fairly proud of the widget engine that we implemented into Maiana recently. In a first step, every topic of any publicly available topic map that was uploaded to Maiana offers a ready-made HTML-Code that allows easy embedding into websites and blogs. The code itself is very lightweight and contains only one Javascript call. This call retrieves all necessary data by sending a pre-defined TMQL query to Maiana. The resulting box looks as if you had cut it right out of the Maiana website.

But this is only the first step. To demonstrate the possibilities of this widget engine, we implemented Yacca. Yacca is a mashup that combines data of all the teams (and their players) that will appear at the FIFA soccer world championship in South Africa with data from the Twitter search API and offers small widgets, containig these two snippets. Of course, the soccer data is stored in a Maiana topic map. In this way, every soccer fan is able to show its support for a favourite player with a widget like the following one. And to get this even more playful, all the Javascript calls are counted to create a definitive list of fame for the world cup players.

Now, think of all the possibilities that spark up with a widget engine like this. You can upload whatever topic map you like and have your topics shared all over the world. We, the Maiana developer team, are really looking forward to see your ideas and applications for this.