Six Degrees of Separation for Wikipedia Articles

Doing some research on the Wikimedia Foundation and I came across this really rad project called wikiGraph that a student of the Hackbright Academy created to visually demonstrate how a person can go from one subject to another, totally seemingly unrelated, subject. Not as unrelated after all.

The about page has links to a detailed discussion of the tech behind the magic. I have some learning to do! But this is kinda like a reading map for encyclopedia articles, though not curated.

Note: this mashup uses structured information from Wikipedia extracted by the DBpedia community.

Creating a Catalog using WordPress

I want to create a catalog.

I want to learn what it takes to be able to search a collection based on things like creator name and format or the language of the resource.

I want to create a thesaurus of terms with lists of preferred terms and broader terms and I want to see how to bend technology that is accessible to all to create this hierarchical list so that a person can browse through the thesaurus.

In short, I'd like to see if WordPress can actually make a catalog. There are some hints along the way such as the plugins WebLibrarian and Custom Post Type UI. But I'm wondering if I can use the plugin to add the content (in my case, a list of resources with their associated metadata that is searchable) and I'm wondering if I can create the thesaurus, let people search/browse through the thesaurus to find the term they are looking for, or to discover all the terms that could mean more or less the same thing and then find everything in the collection based on that term. How do the two interact with each other technology wise... in WordPress?

I submitted a proposal... just waiting to hear back if the non-profit I want to do this for will allow me to mad genius up their website.

wish me luck.

Cataloging vs. Indexing

I'm putting together my website (finally!) and there's tons of opportunities to provide more information about some of the things I'm talking about. But rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm going to use all the wonderful content already present out in the world.

If you are new to the concepts of Cataloging and Indexing and need a quick description in layman's terms, Spencer Jardin, Coordinator of Library Instruction at Eli M. Oboler Library at Idaho State University, put together this simple yet informative slideshare:

Catalog vs Index from Spencer Jardine

If you are further into your information professional role and need reminders of professional points, the American Library Association has a wiki entry titled Cataloging and Classification and a fact sheet on Cataloging Tools.

Making More Maps

So yesterday my boss says to me, "Necesito cuadrar cuantas millas y cuanto tiempo para hacer una excursion en bici:

1. saliendo de la Ceiba, 
2. para la Laguna Kiani, 
3. dando la vuelta por los bunkers, 
4. bajando a las ruinas del central Playa Grande, 
5. regresando a la costa norte, 
6. pasando por Rompeolas 
7. y terminando en la Ceiba."

So I swapped in my clipless pedals, put fresh batteries in my Garmin GPSmap 62 unit and went for a ride. As it turns out, for a 14 mile ride that was totally fun, hit all the great spots and was fairly moderate with only one toughie hill that was toward the end. Two hours later I plug my Garmin into my computer, spend some time puzzling through the instructions at GPSVisualizer (not because they are hard, just because it was my first time and I was learning some new terminology) and at the end of the day, I created this: 

After all that work, I deserve a treat. Like chocolate! Next step is to add pictures! But I'm going to do that tomorrow.