Friday, August 8, 2008

A Brief Note on Status

First, thanks to everybody who has been contributing! We're running all sorts of cool analysis stuff with our data, and most everything you put it makes the analysis a bit better. And that's just the beginning...

We've gotten some feedback recently that basically suggests that our interaction with our user community has been lacking. That has definitely ratcheted up in our priorities, and we have a few things in the works. But for the moment, I thought I'd hit on a few items that people have asked about recently.

  • Usability: Obviously the site has usability flaws -- some larger than others. Specific feedback is most helpful. We've been doing a lot of grimy back-end work, but with your help we won't neglect the front end.
  • Speed: will improve a lot when we move to a server that doesn't have a game port in the back (really). There are certainly some optimizations to do also, but we're prioritizing increased functionality. Stay tuned...
  • Acquiring common sense from elsewhere. Though we haven't shared any of the work yet, we've actually done a lot of work in combining our dataset with other data to get interesting new results. Soon we'll be leveraging those tools to pull in large amounts of (hopefully useful) information from several user-contributed large databases of knowledge. One is, yes you guessed it, Wikipedia.
  • The "fix" flag is just a temporary flag until we implement the UI to edit stuff. It's not quite as simple as it seems because of the interaction with ratings, etc. We're reorganizing the database right now so that such things will become possible.
  • Stats are actually available on http://commons.media.mit.edu/en/stats/ which we haven't promoted yet because it's not complete or well-explained. We do have the raw data to do graphs and other spiffy stuff, but just haven't gotten around to it. Suggestions for neat graphing libraries, or just straight-up code contributions, are welcome.
  • Community involvement is very important to us, though we haven't been showing it yet. We're trying to run this as an open-source project. We haven't officially released the main website code, but we can send a tarball on request, and we're considering ways of doing better. If you can code, you'll be welcome to help out, or help recruit others. The site is written in Python, using Django and the ConceptNet and Divisi libraries that are already available (see the links on the home page).
If there are any other things you'd suggest we do to improve interaction with the user community, please share your views in the comments.

Also, feel free to ask anything -- about the site, the project, us, etc.; we'll try to respond.

-Ken

1 comment:

AKSHAY BHAT said...

any idea when the URI's given in the
conceptnet n3 file will become dereferenceable