Saturday, October 15, 2005

Organizing information

There is many information available to us, but as we can see in the information age what is important is not information itself, but how do we structure that information, in terms of relevance, of classification etc.. RSS has been useful because it delivers such a projection, which consists of the most recent information, from a selected subset of sources, who decides themselves that such and such information is of value to their reader, hence should be available through this channel. Take another information. For instance bus stop times. yes, they are available for me on www.ratp.fr after 4 or five hops. Oh and wouldn't it be good if after I checked my bus stop to retrieve the weather for tonight so I know how to dress. And may be during the day I also would like to check if my stocks went up or down, not that it would change anything but I just like it. Would I spend 30 minutes everyday on this? no then I prefer not to. But had their be a simple service which would allow me to suscribe to those information once I sure would go and do that. One of my friend is interested in the dollar rate, which is important for him to send money to his place. Another one wants to build a little app that for a particular functionnality reads various financial analysts reports from different website and synthetize them. Point of this is: The content published is a projection of datas which fits the needs of various publishers. We want to project the datas on our needs. We should be able to define data sources, independently of the data provider, group and categorize those data as we see fit, and consume those datas as we would like to. So I started a 'personnal projection project', which will enable people to define their own set, and publish this set. This is valuable for personnal use, but also for public use, letting people share not the data itself, but the location of the data, its description, its category etc.. Those data will be exported through standard web service, and of course customisable RSS feed, for integration into custom application, web pages, RSS readers etc. Isn't it funny I wrote all that without the expression web2.0 in?

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