Scott Morrison wrote: >> Please let us know the good the bad and the ugly as feedback from the >> field is very valuable to use (you know, when you stare at something for >> too long you get a little blind so we are not as good at improving it at >> this point). > > So far I've only done one experiment with a largish data set (all RDF > generated from the arXiv's OAI export, scraped from arXiv article > index.html pages, or from citebase's OAI export). A great strength of > faceted browsing for those generating RDF metadata from other sources > is that it's often easy and painless to find unexpected problems with > your metadata. For example, I discovered lots of problems with my > parsing of comma separated fields into separate RDF statements, and > also found some strange bugs with reduplicated data coming from the > aXiv. > > My biggest piece of feedback so far would really be that you need some > better documentation! Nothing is too hard once you've poked around a > bit, but since it is in principle so easy to get up and going, it > would be nice to have sufficient instructions to do so. (Things like: > it's using sesame for the rdf store, which files contain the rdf store > configuration, that it's useing lucene, where lucene stores it data, > etc, would all be great on the website. Also I'm still having trouble > understanding how Longwell 'names' nodes; I can't seem to get it to > use foaf:names, for example. There's an email indexed on google > somewhere about this, but nothing else.) It's a far more polished > program than you'd ever guess from the documentation.
This is very useful feedback, thank you. > Perhaps one of > the dangers of programs produced in academia -- too little incentive > to hang around for the boring documentation part of the work! (I say > this from a position of considerably deeper culpability than whoever > worked on Longwell ...) eh, well, that's a problem not only in academia but also in various open source projects as well, mixing the two together doesn't make it any better ;-) I hear you though, lack of documentation never stopped me from trying something out so I assume that to be the case for other people... but I didn't think of the fact that people might infer from lack of documentation that the software is not polished, usable or stable.. and that is a very good point. hmmm... -- Stefano Mazzocchi Digital Libraries Research Group Research Scientist Massachusetts Institute of Technology E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave skype: stefanomazzocchi Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA email: stefanom at mit . edu ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
