W6 Noodling

I'm just noodling around Danny's W6 ideas. Some background: I have a private project using Moveable Type to build a biographical weblog. The content is of interest only to me, but hopefully the method could be of wider interest. The idea is to post weblog entries of memories as they occur to me, categorised by a broad time frame (e.g. 1981-1987, living in Southend). This kind of categorisation is easy for me since my memory associates events with physical location very well.

It occurred to me to start categorising by Danny's six questions too: who, why, what, when, where, how. I thought I could set up categories in MT such as who/IanDavis, where/SouthendOnSea and when/1980s and have a low overhead way of recording additional metadata. The plan was then to use the W6 ontology to do some inference over the data and see what additional conclusions I could draw about people's whereabouts etc. Unfortunately the MT category system is appalling if you want to use more than one category, or a hierarchy or assign some metadata about the category. Also there's no way that I can see in MT to combine categories dynamically in template output and I want to browse the data by different axes.

This is, of course, a good application of faceted classification so I wondered if there was a better weblogging system out there that could do the job. I stumbled across DiamondWiki a wiki that has built-in faceted classification. I'm now wondering how hackable it is and whether some RDF output using W6 could be squeezed out of it somehow. A wiki of memories is even better than a weblog in some respects. Still noodling...

Permalink: http://blog.iandavis.com/2004/09/w6-noodling/

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