Freebase gets a new look and introduces Acre

October 31, 2008

Freebase just had a major update, both cosmetically and in terms of features. Not sure when this got in, but Kingsley Idehen notes that Freebase is finally on the linked data web, one of the complaints that even those of us who have liked the service have had over time. (Update: Finally found the link to the Freebase RDF service)

One of the more interesting changes is the concept of Bases. What is a base? From the blog post

A base is a way to gather together information about a subject you’re passionate about. It’s a homepage for your structured data, and a community hub for people who share your passion.

Interestingly you can give a base a nice endpoint, e.g. yourbase.freebase.com. Existing methods for data modeling and schema creation stay in place. What I am trying to figure out if this is a play to make Freebase more of a destination site, something I have never quite understood, since the value, from where I sit, is for Freebase to set as a data service. Each base does get its own namespace, localizing endpoints and contexts (pretty nifty actually). This also some, although not a lot, of overlap with some of the stuff Twine is doing as well as with dbpedia. I need to chew on this. You can create bases around your data, but given the underlying data model and scheme don’t change, I don’t quite get the added value. Need to think through this.

The part I dig. I really like the new Make page, and the official release of Acre, the Freebase hosted dev environment, now available via freebaseapps.com. Here’s an example. Let’s see who in the Biogang does something useful with Acre.

Oh, although I am not sure I like Bases, did create one, bioinformatics.freebase.com. All yours

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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Informatics, Semantic Web 

“Glue”ing the web

October 30, 2008

Lots of chatter about Adaptive Blue’s Glue this week. I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while, because it does one thing in particular that really resonates at this end.

First, a quick intro. Glue is a new service that continues Adaptive Blue’s quest to bring context to our actions on the web, hence the usual label as a “semantic” service. The following video probably does the best job of describing the new service



Glue Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

In a nutshell, Glue adds a bar to your browser in the context of a particular page for various categories, e.g. books, friendfeed, etc

Glue

You can choose to annotate the page, like something, see who else might have seen that, and use those as a launchpad to find other interesting material. That’s all fine and dandy, but not the part that is attractive as such. The part that I really dig is that if you view a book on Amazon, Glue tells you who else has seen it and liked it, but not just on Amazon, but on other sites as well. In other words the focus is on the item that you’re looking at. Assuming that there is an API at some point to access some of that common interest graph, you have a powerful platform to find other interesting material and people.

So rehashing the data finds data, then people find people meme, it would be interesting to have such discovery engines for biological resources. Not necessary to find people who were also interested in a particular paper, gene or pathway (although that’s an interesting idea as well), but also to pull out related material across data sources, just as a function of our browsing behavior, or programmatically and then serve up that information as part of a mashup. Life Science data, IMO, lends itself very well to such treatment, so it would be interesting to see if there would ever be a Glue for bioinformatics. The closest thing I have seen is Gaggle.

Given that Adaptive Blue is a customer, please read this disclaimer

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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Informatics, Infotech, Semantic Web 

Changing habits with technology

October 30, 2008

Lots to blog about, so I will just put up something that came to me in the flight from LA to SEA that I took earlier today. First time this sort of occurred to me was a couple of weeks ago at work.

Like many geeks, I carry a moleskine notebook around with me (a small one in my travel bag, a bigger one at work) to scribble down notes just in case, especially in situations where a laptop might be inappropriate or inconvenient. With the iPhone and Evernote, I seem to have stopped doing that. On the plane today, I was writing down all kinds of ideas, except that I wasn’t writing, but typing and this time, the notes would actually be legible afterwards.

Just an example of how our devices and web services are changing our habits, especially as we get better at the interface of online and offline, of syncing across devices, etc. Just the other day, I saw someone launch a big compute job in the cloud using the iPhone as the launch interface. Fascinating times.

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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Technology 

Back to podcasting. Introducing Coast to Coast bio

October 29, 2008

For a long time Hari and I have been talking about doing a podcast. We finally went ahead and started one.

Coast to Coast Bio is a podcast that will evolve over time, but it’s a couple of geeks, who don’t always agree on things, bantering about biology, programming and all kinds of stuff. You might see a screencast or two in there as well. Episode 1 went live today. Still rough around the edges, but hopefully will tighten up as our workflow gets more streamlined.

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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Audio/Video, Podcast 

Getting RESTive

October 25, 2008

I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API.

Those words come from the man who put REST on the map, one Roy Fielding in a bit of a rant against what people call REST today. The post is worth reading for anyone who is into the REST architecture (or isn’t).

Also wanted to point to a couple of responses to Roy’s post. Sam Ruby, who co-authored the book that exposes most of us to REST, is amused by people’s attempts to try and figure out what Roy is saying.

You have to read Leigh Dodd’s post as he channels WALL-E to present his understanding of REST.

Me, I am still trying to get my head around Roy’s post (his writing style isn’t exactly one that lends itself to easy understanding). The one thing that’s clear is this part

if the engine of application state (and hence the API) is not being driven by hypertext, then it cannot be RESTful and cannot be a REST API

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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Software & Internet 

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