KMi Seminars
Building Free Local Information Systems
This event took place on Wednesday 02 November 2005 at 13:15

Jo Walsh

A year ago wirelesslondon prototyped a 'local portal' service for 802.11 wireless networks. People can sign their node up to the network map, just as consume.net used to work, then run the WifiDog client on their node to connect users to the portal service. This collects information about places and things nearby in the form of geo-annotated feeds of RSS, RDF and other structured data. Information is all user-contributed, and the context includes a user-written free-for-reuse map based at http://www.openstreetmap.org/, and a spatial wiki at http://london.openguides.org/ .

The NODE.London project adds depth to the local information system - it is a distributed festival in which 'seed nodes' make detailed descriptions of themselves and offer space and resources to potential participants in their area. While working on calendaring tools that connect to the RDF model of space, something on the level of a 'framework' dropped out - nodel.

nodel is a tiny framework for building semantic web meta-applications. It provides an 'interface pack' to many trendy web services with machine interfaces, like flickr, openguides, del.icio.us, et al. You define a world model in an RDF schema, making sure a few key properties are described, then you can generate a web application from the schema, Ruby-on-Rails style. Each nodel application can communicate with the others; the knowledge base is distributed by default.

nodel comes with a spatial feed aggregator and 'stuff associator', bbox. In our setup it runs as an information archive and syndication service: there is one 'big brain' which talks to openstreetmap, openguides et al; then the smaller nodel applications - the portal/map service, the event publishing service, the topic-based email archive explorer - all talk to it, asking for information 'nearby' (to a place, perhaps also to a time or a person) and telling it what they learn. This 'brain' will also be available as a HTTP based web service for other apps, such as the main WifiDog captive portal auth service, to collect feeds from.

This short seminar will present a rapid overview of the tools then get right down to the workings and building of applications in the hope of being able to customise the service in the afternoon. Knowledge about RDF and how it works would be a really big plus for attendees.

 
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Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities