Tim, Thanks for your long reply to my question. What you said makes perfect sense. Indeed, as much as I can't see myself, or any group, institution, or company, write all of my/their documents in Wikipedia, I can't see myself or anyone else storing all of my/their data in Google Base/Freebase. Their support for social collaboration is nice, though.
David Tim Churches wrote: > David Huynh wrote: > >> I'm curious-- have you considered using other technologies/services like >> Google Base, Ning, ManyEyes, and then the new buzzing FreeBase to >> manage, visualize, and publish your data? If you have, then why are you >> not using them in this case? Just curious :-) Thanks. >> > > ManyEyes I have looked at before and I think it is a very interesting > development, although obviously it would benefit hugely from the > availability of semantically annotated quantitative datasets, and from > visualisation tools which use that semantic annotation to help users > explore and visualise the data. I've just started work on that for > epidemiological and population health data. As it stands, I don't think > that ManyEyes provides sufficiently rich tools to allow others to > explore other aspects of data - only one or a limited, fairly simplistic > set of views are available, although the datasets are there to allow > other views of the same data to be created - but the process for doing > so it not as spontaneous or as quick as it might be. There also needs to > be a facility for linking multiple views with a commentary in order to > tell a story or make a case for a particular evidence-based conclusion > or assertion. But I digress. > > Ning seems to be a social networking facility, not really what we need > for allowing people to browse and explore information about free, open > source health software. > > FreeBase looks very interesting indeed, in all the ways that Google Base > is not, but both suffer from the fact that they are, in the end, > proprietary databases stored on someone else's computer. If FreeBase > content (meaning all the annotations and relationships which people end > up adding to content) really are licensed under a Creative Commons > licenses and there is a way of extracting and moving the data elsewhere > for re-use or re-purposing, then it may well be a good solution. But at > the moment they seem to be at an early stage and I haven't been offered > a test account despite requesting one, so it is hard to tell. > > Also, for the purposes of OSHCA, which is an international group > promoting free, open source software in health, we prefer to use things > which are themselves free and open source software, like Exhibit. None > of the others discussed above are. > > Tim C > > _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
