Category: Ideas

Sorry I have been quiet for a while. I’ve been very busy preparing for a MacArthur presentation next week. I’ve been building the Story Starters site…and having a fun time in source code. The basics of the site are done and almost ready for public play (on the “reference implementation at least). We’ll need to do some re-writing and cleaning up (not good to do database design while you are also figuring out the feature set).
It is also becoming clear to me how Story Starters is going to become the next version of QABuilder – OpenQA.

I hope to have a site up for folks to look at end of next week.

Well, yesterday I finished up a working demo site of Story Starters for the National Science Digital Library. Doing that and teaching kept me too busy to blog. My plan is to make a more general and scalable demo for the world. Hopefully I can have that up by the end of the week. My intention is to also tie in Reference Extract.

Right now in Reference Extract you can search digital reference knowledge-bases and then extend your search to cited references.Like this:

DR Archives –> Cited Searches

No imagine, chaining more specific searches together, so now we can add blogs in Story Starters:

Blogs –> DR Archives –> Cited Searches

Making this capability generic, a local library could add their archives, and then extend to Reference Extract:

My Library –> DR Archives –> Cited Search

And one could continue to add more links:

My Library –> DR Archive –> Cited Search –> Google

The idea would be to make a general utility to tie these searches together in a seamless interface and allow any interface mix and match (and collapse) these chains based on a given user interface. So a library could go:

My Library –> Cited Search –> Google

etc.

Just an idea. Off to start the Story Starter site.

We’re in the process of developing a service called “Story Starters.” It is sort of a fun idea that grew out of an immediate need. The immediate need was a way to connect Blogs with our QABuilder software. Where we’ve ended up (for now) is a general blog starting service. A person or organization posts some list of items they want to be blogged about, and from within blogging software (WordPress to start with), can browse lists and pick the ones they want to blog about. The resulting blog entries are then aggregated and sent back to the posting agent…read more to see why this might be useful.
Continue reading “Story Starters”

So as I mentioned I’m working on linking blogging and digital reference, and trying to figure out how to pass messages between the two without doing a major re-work on QABuilder. Then it hit me (I’m slow sometimes)…this is what we built NISO AZ to do, and why we integrated it into QABuilder. It should be a simple matter to get questions and answers into QABuilder using NISO AZ.
Continue reading “NISO Rises from the Ashes”

We’re busy working with WordPress to link it to QABuilder, our digital reference research package we developed for the NSF’s National Science Digital Library. It is looking quite promising. In particular we’re looking at using WordPress plugins. I also think XML-RPC has some promise to do this as well.
Continue reading “Linking Blogging and Digital Reference”