mSpace more than anything is an idea about access and exploration: improving access to information; helping people make connexions from one idea to another.
mSpace has been expressed as an interaction model (ah03 paper; ht04 paper): the idea of an interaction model is to look at what attributes you want to support for an interaction, and see how they can be formalized. From the formalism, it becomes possible to see how it can be applied to situations in general that may wish to use the model.
More recently, mSpace has been deployed as an evolving software framework based on Semantic Web technologies ( demo, software download, framework docs(pdf, 1.6m)), which embodies many attributes from the interaction model. The mission with the framework is to enable folks interested in this open standards approach to making connexions among data to do so - to at least try one way of exploring data that can be hooked up in such an associative way.
And just yesterday, mSpace became an example.
In this case, an example "for someone trying to make use of data on the web, the web is one huge heterogenous data integration problem."
The great thing is that the person who turned to the project is Mike Linksvayer, CTO of the Creative Commons project, looking at getting more information to more people in less entangled ways.
Of course the other happy thing is that none of our team knows Mike personally, so it's nice to see that mSpace is moving out beyond the shores of its home in ECS at the U of Southampton.
And one more great thing is that mSpace was used as an example in the context of a talk given on a panel called "“The Semantic Web: Promising Future or Utter Failure”" at SXSW; it was placed on the side of Promising Future - perhaps in no small part because, as Linksvayer put it, "it won’t be obvious to an end user that they’re [using] a semantic web technologies application, and that’s as it should be." Here here!
Future Note: While we've put up an mspace browser for classical music, the model can be applied to any domain. If IMDB used Mike's Creative Commons licensing, we'd be able to put out an mSpace of movies (it's built, but we can't show it to you, since that would cost us 10k). But other mSpaces are sprouting up (one in the Sculpteur project is to use the model rather than the framework as a java applet-based ontology browser in a museums context). We'll link to these mspaces as they become available.
Among other things, we're also working on supporting the intersection of multiple mSpace domains (via a meta-mSpace), so that people can move as easily to tangents among domains, as they do now within domains.
Geek Note: you don't have to have a formal ontology to build an mSpace. If you have one, that's nice, and you get the added benefits of inferencing and connection which an ontology makes possible, but if you want to start light, you only need to define what we've been calling a "domain model" for your info. It's what might be seen as an implicit schema. We're working on a tool set to make constructing a model file dead simple. In the meantime, instructions are in the software docs on sourceforge included in the download.
If you want to see a full bore semantic web ap on steroids which uses an ontology, and is a precursor in its implementation to mSpace (it doesn't have all the sorting/swapping/slicing features of an mSpace), take a look at CS AKTive Space (CAS), an ap for exploring who's doing what research in computer science in the UK (described in the paper "CS AKTive Space or how we stopped worrying and learned to love the Semantic Web").
CAS won the Semantic Web Challenge of 2003 in part because it: got data from a host of heterogeneous sources, used them in ways for which the data's initial deployment was not presented, demonstrated the power of an ontology for doing inference over data (like who collaborates with who which is not in any of the data explicitly; what other stuff not already known about have these people done), it could scale (this thing handles tens of millions of triples - the manner of storing data in rdf for SW deployment) - and it lets folks explore complex queries in simple direct manipulation kinds of ways.
We took the lessons learned from deploying CAS in order to make a first pass at (a) implementing the richer set of interactions we wanted to support, like picking what things you want to explore, and being able to reorganize these on the fly, and (b) making it easier to sling an mSpace across RDF data without requiring all the heavy lifting of an ontology, but letting designers use and benefit from it when they had one.
In the meanwhile, thank you for using mSpace as an example. We're developing new ways to keep it light: to make it easy for folks to use the advantages of the semantic web without them (you and me) having to know that they're/we're using it.
Posted by mc at March 19, 2005 01:12 PM