Fluidinfo as a concordance

Posted on April 6, 2011

A few weeks ago, I started reading the Harry Potter books for the first time (I’ve yet to see the movies). The O’Reilly Fluidinfo Writable API competition started around the same time, and after poking around Fluidinfo for awhile I thought it would be great way to keep track of all the characters. In short, it seemed like it would great as concordance software.

A concordance is a set of notes an author might use to keep track of characters, their backgrounds, what they do in the book, which characters they meet, and so on. Before computers were so ubiquitous, a concordance might be a notebook or a set of index cards. As computers got cheaper, software packages for writers eventually became an industry, and many of these have some system for keeping track of characters, places, and so on. However, fans of books and films also use and create concordances for pretty much the same reason: to keep track of who does what to whom, and where, when, and how it was done.

To test out the idea of Fluidinfo as a concordance, I decided to use the Star Wars films. While it would be great for the Harry Potter series, they’re still too new to me. Star Wars, on the other hand, I can come up with characters, places, and events from the films with no problems. There is a large Star Wars Expanded Universe out there with books, graphic novels, cartoons, a Holiday Special, and more, but I don’t know as much about them. Also, from what I understand, only the things that happened in the films are considered 100% canonical (feel free to let me know if that’s not the case). For these reasons, I limited the project to the films only.

To get started, I began creating objects in Fluidinfo. Anyone can create objects in Fluidinfo without needing to be logged in or create a user account, so this was the easiest place to start. First off were objects for the films:

film:star wars episode i the phantom menace (1999)
film:star wars episode ii attack of the clones (2002)
film:star wars episode iii revenge of the sith (2005)
film:star wars episode iv a new hope (1977)
film:star wars episode v the empire strikes back (1980)
film:star wars episode vi return of the jedi (1983)

It’s possible to stop there and just start tagging those objects with details like places, characters, events, and so on. However, given the level of detail in the Expanded Universe, it seemed like a better idea to create objects for many of these things, then tag those objects with details.

So, I created some objects for different characters:

star wars character:anakin skywalker
star wars character:beru lars
star wars character:boba fett
star wars character:c 3po
star wars character:chewbacca
star wars character:count dooku
star wars character:darth maul
star wars character:darth sidious
star wars character:darth tyranus
star wars character:darth vader
star wars character:greedo
star wars character:han solo
star wars character:jabba the hutt
star wars character:jan dodonna
star wars character:jar jar binks
star wars character:lando calrissian
star wars character:leia organa
star wars character:luke skywalker
star wars character:mace windu
star wars character:mon mothma
star wars character:nute gunray
star wars character:obi wan kenobi
star wars character:owen lars
star wars character:padme amidala
star wars character:palpatine
star wars character:qui gon jinn
star wars character:r2 d2
star wars character:shmi skywalker
star wars character:wedge antilles
star wars character:wilhuff tarkin

Then some different locations:

star wars location:alderaan
star wars location:bespin
star wars location:coruscant
star wars location:dagobah
star wars location:death star i
star wars location:death star ii
star wars location:endor
star wars location:geonosis
star wars location:hoth
star wars location:kamino
star wars location:kashyyyk
star wars location:mustafar
star wars location:naboo
star wars location:tatooine
star wars location:tatooine:anchorhead
star wars location:tatooine:dune sea
star wars location:tatooine:great pit of carkoon
star wars location:tatooine:jabbas palace
star wars location:tatooine:lars homestead
star wars location:tatooine:mos eisley
star wars location:tatooine:mos eisley cantina
star wars location:tatooine:mos espa
star wars location:utapau
star wars location:yavin 4

As if that wasn’t enough, there are also objects for weapons, too:

star wars weapon:blaster pistol
star wars weapon:blaster rifle
star wars weapon:bowcaster
star wars weapon:death star i
star wars weapon:death star ii
star wars weapon:force lightning
star wars weapon:lightsaber

Deciding that was enough to get started, I started creating some tags. The first was lafnlab/redirect-to. This is sort of a general purpose tag, not specific to concordances or Star Wars. I use it to point to canonical objects. If I create an object, and find I misspelled it afterward, I can’t delete the object. It’s a good idea, but sort of frustrating. By using lafnlab/redirect-to, I can point to the correct object. I sort of hope that there will be a fluiddb/redirect-to tag at some point (hint, hint). In this case, I tagged star wars character:darth tyranus with lafnlab/redirect-to and entered the object for star wars character:count dooku. Someone who opens the Darth Tyranus object will see this tag and the link. If they click on the link, they are redirected to the Count Dooku object. I also placed the tag on Darth Sidious to redirect to Palpatine. However, I kept Darth Vader separate from Anakin Skywalker, figuring there was enough going on with each that they can be considered different people. Of course, it all depends on your point of view.

After that, I created a new namespace called cc, which is short for concordance. In the cc namespace, I made a bunch of new tags:

alter-ego
child-of
fought-alongside
fought-against
in-book
in-film
macguffin
owned-by
owns
parent-of
portrayed-by
sibling-of
spouse-of
student-of
teacher-of
titles-jobs
vehicles
visited
voiced-by
weapons

Again, it’s just a starting point. To create tags or to apply tags, you need to login to Fluidinfo, which means creating an account. Someone else might want to use different tags. Mine are supposed to be sort of general purpose, since I may use them on other films or books.

So what can be done with all of this? Plenty. If someone entered information from all of the books, they could come up with a family tree app that starts with Shmi Skywalker and continues to her great-grandchildren. Run the query lafnlab/cc/titles-jobs matches "Jedi" to get a list of Jedi from the films. Find out how many people did Yoda teach, and how many of those became Sith Lords. These are just a few examples.

The main aim of this post is to show how Fluidinfo can be used as a concordance. It doesn’t have to just be Star Wars. It doesn’t even have to be grandiose. It could be used for anything from a series of seven books (looks at the Harry Potter books on the table) to a one-person play. It only takes the will to create some objects and some tags to tie them together.

Fluidinfo and social tagging

Posted on April 3, 2011

For the past few weeks, I’ve been messing around with Fluidinfo as a result of the O’Reilly Fluidinfo Writable API Competition. My entry to the competition can be found tucked away over here. Fluidinfo was started in 2009, so it’s still early in what it plans to do, but I think the competition is one way for it to get the word out and raise its profile.

What is Fluidinfo? It’s sort of hard to describe, because it’s potentially different things to different people. One of the obvious comparisons is to Wikipedia, so I’ll use that as a starting point. Where Wikipedia has articles, Fluidinfo has objects…

Wikipedia has an article on George Orwell’s 1984. The article describes the background of the book, has information on the principal characters, the book’s themes and so on. The article is informative and people who read the article also have a chance to edit it, but that’s probably the extent of their interaction with the article.

Fluidinfo has an object on the same book. On this object, users can add tags they think are relevant, such as whether they read it or whether they thought it was any good. The object in Fluidinfo doesn’t have a synopsis of the book or information on the characters, but there’s nothing to stop someone from tagging the object with this information.

Fluidinfo is more or less built on the idea of shared data. Most companies build their own databases, which are walled gardens. These databases are their intellectual property and they can decide who has access to the data and what sort of limits they want to place on it. But with Fluidinfo, a bookstore might tag the 1984 object with how many copies they have in stock and have another tag that show which shelf it’s on. They could extract this data from Fluidinfo and send it to their website, making it useful for their customers. They could also extract the data to their inventory system, making it useful for their employees. They could also tag the object with the name of their supplier, making it more useful still. It’s not a walled garden because anyone can read the tags placed by other users. Someone browsing Fluidinfo can find out which users thought 1984 was a good book versus those who didn’t think highly of it, or they can find out if their local bookstore has copies of it.

While Fluidinfo’s objects are very different from Wikipedia’s articles, there are some other differences as well. The first difference is the scale or scope. Wikipedia has been around for years and has millions of articles. Fluidinfo has been around a couple of years and has nowhere near the number of objects (thousands, maybe tens of thousands). This is probably also tied to the number of users. Wikipedia has a very large and active user base and thousands of new articles are created every day. If I had to guess, I think the Fluidinfo user base might be a few dozen people at the moment – I don’t have this information, so I’m basing it one the number of usernames (namespaces) I’ve seen when browsing objects. Still, every venture starts small. Even Amazon and Google probably had a few dozen users at some point.

Another big difference between Wikipedia and Fluidinfo right now is how difficult it is to find things in Fluidinfo. Objects are actually identified by an alphanumeric sequence. What makes them easier to find is the about tag. When I was looking for the object for 1984 earlier, I did a query in the Fluidinfo Explorer, which was fluiddb/about matches “orwell”. It would have been easier if I could have just typed orwell or 1984. This is due to Fluidinfo’s alpha status. In their faq’s, they note that text matching isn’t available yet, but should be in the future.

Every object in Fluidinfo has an about tag. This is basically the “name” of the object. Fluidinfo will still identify objects by the alphanumeric sequence, but people (users) will undoubtedly use the about tag to find things. As an example, Fluidinfo identifies the 1984 object as a78d77ce-a055-40e3-97a9-de4223858bd8, while the about tag is much easier to understand: book:nineteen eighty four (george orwell).

As an aside, there’s a very good blog that’s largely about the about tag. It’s written by one of the earlier and most active users – he was responsible for entering the Guardian 1000 books into Fluidinfo. A lot of the posts, at least the ones that most interest me, are the ones that talk about the conventions of adding data to Fluidinfo. Anyone who has spent a fair amount of time at Wikipedia probably knows about disambiguation pages and redirects. They solve a lot of the clutter and organizational issues – someone searching for Mercury might be looking for the element, the planet, a car brand, or the mythological character. The author of the About Tag blog has spent a lot of time on these ideas and his blog serves as sort of a style manual for the about tag.

I think Fluidinfo has a lot of promise, but there’s a lot of work to be done. For my part, I’ll probably be seeding it with some more new objects (books and movies, probably) and maybe writing an app or two to pull stuff out of Fluidinfo, just to show what can be done with it.

Egypt

Posted on February 3, 2011

Like many people, over the past week or so I’ve been following the events in Egypt via online news sites. It’s strange, because Egypt is so far away and I have no connections there, but it’s fascinating in the same way that watching the August coup attempt in the Soviet Union was fascinating.

As I said, I don’t have any connections over there, so I’ve sort of been ambivalent about it all. The protesters are fighting for democracy – that’s good. I can relate to that. But I also wondered if Hosni Mubarak is really that bad. Yes, he’s been in power for a long time – three decades, but each country has their political traditions, so who am I to judge. He supports Middle East Peace™, mostly plays nice with Israel, and supports the War on Terror™. He’s our guy in Egypt.

The largest opposition group in the Egyptian parliament is the Muslim Brotherhood, who would like to turn Egypt from a secular nation into an Islamic one, like Iran. Bad as Mubarak may be, I wonder what would happen if the Muslim Brotherhood came to power. Thinking about that unappealing prospect reminded me of the old saying “Better the Devil you know…”.

After a time, the protests seemed to have produced results. Egypt got its first vice-president in decades and Mubarak said he wouldn’t stand for re-election. However, the elections are scheduled for September and many protesters worry he won’t keep his word. Still, it seems like a good compromise. Is it too much to ask people to step back and wait for the elections?

Then I read this. (Hmph. His site is suspended now, so here’s a mirror of the article on Google Docs. I’ll post a mirror here if it continues to be a problem elsewhere).

For most of the article, (cheekily-named) Sandmonkey explains why they are protesting. They’re fighting for democracy and an end to corruption. It’s not about the Muslim Brotherhood, because they are still a minority and they’re sort of Johnnie-come-latelies to the whole thing. They fear if they leave now, the Mubarak supporters will eventually come for them.

The most powerful paragraph is the last. Sandmonkey wrote:

The End is near. I have no illusions about this regime or its leader, and how he will pluck us and hunt us down one by one till we are over and done with and 8 months from now will pay people to stage fake protests urging him not to leave power, and he will stay “because he has to acquiesce to the voice of the people”. This is a losing battle and they have all the weapons, but we will continue fighting until we can’t. I am heading to Tahrir right now with supplies for the hundreds injured, knowing that today the attacks will intensify, because they can’t allow us to stay there come Friday, which is supposed to be the game changer. We are bringing everybody out, and we will refuse to be anything else than peaceful. If you are in Egypt, I am calling on all of you to head down to Tahrir today and Friday. It is imperative to show them that the battle for the soul of Egypt isn’t over and done with. I am calling you to bring your friends, to bring medical supplies, to go and see what Mubarak’s gurantees look like in real life. Egypt needs you. Be Heroes.

Damn.

The passion with which they are fighting for democracy humbles me. They are my heroes.

Haiku to go

Posted on January 31, 2010

Last year I bought the domains gottahavacuppamocha.info and gottahavacuppamocha.mobi, but haven’t done much with them. A few weeks ago, I set up another WordPress blog at the .mobi site, but one that only has the haiku.

Since starting this a few years ago, I’ve seen over 600 films and done a review haiku for each one. I’ve toyed with the idea about putting them in a book, and that may still happen one of these days, but until then it seemed like a good idea to create a separate site just for the haiku. This way, a person can read through the haiku, without having to read the other posts.

The site, http://gottahavacuppamocha.mobi/haiku has over 200 haiku at the moment and I’ll be posting more in the days and weeks to come. Since I’m also learning about iPhone apps, it’s possible there may be an “app for that” in the future.

NaNoWriMo

Posted on September 27, 2009

Last year, one of the bloggers I follow signed up for something called NaNoWriMo, which I had never heard of. NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, and it’s a contest where participants try to write a novel during the month of November.

This is the 11^th year of NaNoWriMo it gets bigger every year. The goal seems simple – write a story of more than 50,000 words. According to the FAQs, anyone who writes 50,000 words is declared a winner, and there are no prizes other than a certificate (as a PDF file). However, the real prize is the satisfaction of having written 50,000 words of a story. That doesn’t mean the novel is good, or coherent, or publishable, or interesting, but it is over 50,000 words, so that’s gotta count for something ;-) Apparently, 50,000 words is about 175 pages, which doesn’t seem very long IMHO, but according to Wikipedia some novels around 50,000 words include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Brave New World, and The Great Gatsby.

If one is writing according to the rules of NaNoWriMo, writing on the novel begins on November 1^st and ends at midnight local time on November 30^th or 50,000 words later, whichever happens first. The author can do research, make notes, and do whatever before November, but the novel writing must begin in November. They encourage people not to worry so much about editing (that is what December is for), but to concentrate on getting the words out and reaching the 50,000 word mark. It’s more about quantity than quality, but the story might be a diamond in the rough. It can be polished into something better.

For me, I’ve got some rough ideas and some basic characters floating around in my head, so maybe they can be coaxed into 50,000 words or more. We’ll see what November brings.

Film buff

Posted on July 11, 2009

A few months ago I began adding Apture links to the website. I had seen it on a few other sites and it was interesting that you could get a glimpse of a web page without having to open another tab or window. When I found out they linked to IMDB, I was sold on it (it’s also free).

After working with it awhile, some issues are apparent. Apture works very well with Wikipedia, @Twitter, and some other sites, but it doesn’t seem to work consistently well with IMDB. I can get Apture to work with Rotten Tomatoes, but I have to manually add the links, because they are not in Apture’s system yet. It’s sort of strange that a site that is in Apture’s system, doesn’t work well with it, yet a site that isn’t in the system, does.

However, IMDB is is more comprehensive in it’s listings than Rotten Tomatoes. I admit, there are some pretty obscure films on this site, and they sometimes test the comprehensiveness of websites. Right now, IMDB lists Urban Scenze, Vol. 2, but not Urban Scenze, Vol. 1, while Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t list either one. The All-American Girl is listed on IMDB, but not at Rotten Tomatoes. However, that one was rated X and I think Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t create pages for films with that rating. I may be wrong, of course.

Despite all that, I will keep adding Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB links to the Review Haiku, because they are probably are the best places to turn if you want further information on any given film. In the future, I may add different links, if the movies are difficult to find for rental or purchase.

Supply and demand

Posted on June 30, 2009

I don’t know about this, but it seems strange/odd. Maybe it’s the economy or something.

At work, I ordered an HP LaserJet printer from a vendor a couple of weeks ago. Shipments from this vendor usually arrive in a few days, so yesterday I sent them an email asking where they expected to ship the printer. Two weeks is a long time for this vendor, so sending an inquiry seemed appropriate. Their reply was received a few hours later, saying there were supply problems and HP notified them it would be 6 – 8 weeks before the printer shipped. That’s a lifetime, so I’ll be shopping around at other vendors for something that isn’t HP. The annoyance factor is their website doesn’t mention if something is in stock or not. It just has the “Add to cart” button.

Last week, I ordered a replacement video card for my MacPro. A day or two later, the company sent me an email saying it would be a few extra days because they had it on backorder with the supplier. Yesterday, they sent me an email saying they were having a hard time finding a source for this card.

If each order was late separately, it wouldn’t seem so strange. This makes me wonder if there is a shortage of something going on. Shipping? Silicon? Simple coincidence?

WordPress 2.8 upgrade

Posted on June 11, 2009

WordPress 2.8 came out yesterday afternoon and I just finished the upgrade. For the past few versions, WordPress has become one of the most user-friendly pieces of software I’ve seen. It seems well thought out and well-constructed.

WordPress has a tool called Upgrade in the Admin panel, which allows people to easily upgrade or reinstall the WordPress code. No FTP needed, since it’s as simple as clicking a button. However, it’s not problem-free.

I have this blog for myself and a test blog I use for work. I logged into this blog and there was nothing new – there was no notice about the new version. Logging into the test blog, there were two banners mentioning the upgrade. Upgrading the test blog was virtually effortless, but I was puzzled by the lack of a notice on gottahavacuppamocha. The Upgrade tool said the blog was using 2.7.1 and that it was the latest version. On a hunch, I clicked on the Re-install button. WordPress 2.7.1 was reinstalled, but when it finished, there was a notice about the 2.8 version. I clicked on the button and let it upgrade. The upgrade went easy, but I had to trick WordPress to do so.

Still, WordPress is far more user-friendly than MediaWiki. MediaWiki is easier to setup, but WordPress is easier to maintain. WP isn’t perfect, but it’s damn close.

Rating:  

Meta-blog

Posted on April 18, 2009

A few things going on today. First, I added a plugin to WP that allows me to rate films. Review Haiku are nice, but they mainly sum up the film, rather than saying if a film is good or bad. Using the plugin, I can give the films a score, which I’m basing off the ratings I gave them at Netflix. Netflix ratings run like this:

• 5 stars – I loved this film!
• 4 stars – I really liked this film.
• 3 stars – I liked this film.
• 2 stars – I didn’t like this film.
• 1 star – I hated this film!

I don’t think Netflix allows zero stars, because their system will just look at it as being unscored.

I’ve got all the Review Haiku in a text file for easy reference (for myself), but the file only had the name of the film and the accompanying haiku. After adding the plugin, I went back to my Netflix rental history and grabbed the ratings I gave each film to put into the file. As it turns out, I missed a few haiku. There are three films I saw, but didn’t write haiku for. I’ll have to work them in at some point.

Also, I got linked to by The Film Cynics for the Review Haiku. Nice to know they’re appreciated :-)

Review Haiku – #amazonfail

Posted on April 12, 2009

What’s Amazon Rank?
Protect people from ‘bad’ books
Can’t read if can’t see

Amazon Rank at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

More info in my previous post here.

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