http://rdfbeans.sourceforge.net

What’s this

It’s a prototype of a social network service where people are connected automatically via shared topics of interests extracted from their texts. You can find more on the PCN theory in this post.

If you’re interested to play with it, we are glad to invite you to join the testing.

How to join

1. Request a personal invitation code by filling this form. The code will be sent to the provided email address.

2. Register on PCN with your invitation code. Your username must be the same you used in the request above.

3. Download, install and configure the PCN client (Conex) as proposed by the system.

To run the client, an installed Java Runtime Environment is required. You also may need the Java plugin installed into your browser for visualisation of the network in your server profile.

The PCN Client

The PCN client software (Conex, from “CONcept EXtraction”) is a desktop content aggregator collecting pieces of content from different locations (local folders, webs, email, RSS feeds, Del.icio.us, SharePoint servers …). The content is analyzed to extract valuable terms from the texts and assign them as the document tags (manual tagging is possible also). A user can browse her content collections with the tag cloud or  metadata facets, edit document metadata, annotate documents, search in the content collections and do a lot of other things. Those who are interested into details of client functionality and in a underlying technology, can check this site.

To configure PCN connection, select  “PCN Client → Configure PCN Client” menu. At the first time, it will ask your username/password on the server and offer to create one or more contexts for your data. The contexts serves as navigation facets to browse the content collection and are useful to organize the content resources depending on your activities. After the contexts are defined, you can assign existing Conex content locations to them.

Autotagging is applied to individual documents by selecting them and choosing “Autotagging…” in the context menu. This operation can also be automated for all documents in a specific location, if “Apply autotagging for new documents” option is set in the location properties (“Settings” tab of the location dialog box). You can edit the results of autotagging or add new tags for selected documents using “Edit tags” option of the context menu.

As the content is tagged, Conex sends the tagging data and resource descriptions to the server, where a profile of user’s interests is created. All updates in the monitored locations are also sent to the server (in the specified time interval) to keep the user profile up-to-date.

By default, Conex works with the files in your local folders. To enable other types of content locations, you need to install the plugins. A plugin is installed with a single click in the Plugin Management console (“Tools → Manage plugins…” menu) and will be activated after restart.

PDF, MS Office, OpenOffice, HTML, XML and plain text documents are supported out of the box.

For SCAN users

To clarify the things, Conex is neither a proprietary fork, nor a new version of SCAN. It’s basically a rebranded distribution bundled with the common document plugins and integrated into the PCN solution. There is a plugin providing connectivity with the PCN Server and it’s possible to install this plugin into “native” SCAN to use it as a full-featured PCN client. This likely won’t work with the released version, but should be ok with a SVN snapshot. Anyway, new SCAN version enabling the PCN plugin will be released soon, so stay tuned.

The PCN Server

The server receives data from the clients and builds the socio-semantic network of users connected via the tags they have in common. After you’ve submitted some data from Conex, you can check your profile on the server to see your tags and  people appeared in your personal network:

The people listed in your network are the users who have the similar interests. On their profile pages, you can see a detailed information on compatibility between you and a profile owner:

The Network view displays a visualization of your complete network as a map of the overlapping clusters of tags you share with the members of your network:

The map is interactive — double-clicking an element will navigate to a user profile or to a tag page.

The people search is also implemented. You can find users by their names, other profile data or by the tags:

And finally, you can explore the content collections of the network members using faceted navigation with tags and contexts (supplemental metadata facets, such as document authors and  creation dates are also available).

Your privacy

⚠ The full text of the documents is not submitted to the server, however, Conex can use excerpts from the documents to fill the title and description metadata (if it is not defined explicitly). So, if your documents contain some sensitive information, parts of it may appear on the public. Please check and make sure that there are no private documents in the Conex locations you are about to assign to the PCN contexts. Well, you’ve been warned.

Report issues

It’s a beta, so  the bugs are likely to be there. Feel free to report the bugs, either in the Server or the Client,  to the bug tracker (registration is needed). Any other feedback, of course, is also more than welcome.

RSS of Cyberborean Chronicles now is http://blog.cyberborean.org/feed.

Changes

Main taxonomy of the content (tags) is preserved, but the structure of categories is completely redesigned. In 1.0 version, categories were used to identify topics and thus duplicated the tags in many cases. In fact, there were two independent systems of topics classification.

In new version, topics are identified only by tags (java, linux, coding etc) while “categories” are used to classify  posts by their type, format or purpose (Announcements, Essays, Howtos etc). Thus, there are two  clearly distincted taxonomies: topics and types.

Reading a post, you may notice “See also” menu in the sidebar. It contains the posts similar to the current one – those you might want to read if you are interested in that topic. This magic is a courtesy of Similar Posts Wordpress plugin.

Photos

I also launched a standalone photo gallery and moved all pics from my Flickr account to there. Now the gallery is another part of Cyberborean Chronicles: http://photos.cyberborean.org. The pics are organized with their own system of tags.

I’m not going to post gallery updates in the blog (former Photos category) anymore, except for the shots I have to tell something special about. You can see gallery updates (the latest pics) at the widget on the right sidebar. You also can subscribe to the updates feed: http://photos.cyberborean.org/main.php?g2_view=rss.SimpleRender.

Gears

Wordpress just rocks as usual and gears everything on this site with a help of the following plugins (alphabetically):

• ActiveLink lets quickly insert links to Wikipedia definitions.
• Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button: you can see this button on every post page to add the post to your favorite bookmarking services.
• Akismet keeps spammers away from my blog.
• Contact Form 7 powers the form to contact me on the Feedback page.
• Similar Posts does all magic to generate “See also” menus.
• Simple Tags helps me to tag the content and generates the tag cloud (see on the left)
• SyntaxHighlighter Plus converts code snippets into eye candies.
• WPG2 integrates the photogallery with the blog

The photogallery is powered by Gallery2 software. To photos from Flickr are imported with Gallery2Flickr plugin (hacked to fix the dates of the imported pics).

Please note that everything is still a beta, so any feedback is welcome. Thanks!

If you haven’t noticed already, there was no simple way to just enter a web URL in SCAN and get a document in the repository. One had to add web documents via del.icio.us or fetch them from RSS. Now it is fixed – with Web plugin you can add web-pages with their URL’s and more – you can tell the plugin to follow hyperlinks and crawl web-pages recursively, thus adding whole web-sites to SCAN document repository.

More on Web-plugin »

To install new plugin, click on “Check for updates” button in Plugins manager window (“Tools?Manage plugins”). Web plugin will appear in “Location type plugins” section.

• Download SCAN 1.3.1

What’s fixed actually:

• [1976004] Wrong document date breaks the application
• [1976266] No validation of date values in Document properties
• [1976036] Indexing fails with String index out of range error
• [1976045],[1925137] Function keys starts editing the table
• [1976066] Application window doesn’t open immediately on start
• [1903350] Exclusion Filter Regular Expression

• My profile

Feel free to follow me or invite me to follow you.

You also can view my twittering at the sidebar on this blog.

Twittering from a console:

$ curl -u twittername:password -s -F status="Your text here"
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml http://twitter.com/account/end_session

One can write a nifty handy shell script also.

“How does SCAN help me?”, “Why should I use it?”, “Who are the users?”, “Why it is smart?”, “Can it replace a …?”, “What is autotagging?”, technical tips-n-tricks, development questions and a lot of other things you would want to know about Smart Content Aggregation & Navigation technology.

Read SCAN FAQ »

(Read more on SCAN website)