SwirrlSpeak

Swirrl linked data consultancy

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:30:00 +0100

Alongside developing our online database application, we spend time talking to our users and potential users about how they can manage their data. As well as being useful to them (we hope!) this helps us understand the range of problems people are facing and gets us thinking about the kinds of solution that are needed, helping us set the future direction of our software tools.

Because this seems to be a useful activity all round, we’re now putting a bit more emphasis on it and making it more widely known that this is a service we offer. So we’ve put up a new services page on our website to give some more details.

The practical application of semantic web and linked data technologies is at the heart of what we are doing with Swirrl, and that is also the focus of our consulting work. We cover:

Data publishing strategy
Selection and design of ontologies
Conversion of data to RDF
Use of semantic web technologies for data integration and exchange

This work is not directly related to Swirrl the product: it’s about addressing our clients’ data sharing issues and advising on how the semantic web and linked data can contribute to a solution.

If you’d like to know more, drop us a line at consulting@swirrl.com

API on the way

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:25:00 +0100

We’ve been working hard over the last few weeks on designing and implementing our API – well the first version of it at least. Connecting up data on the web is one of our main objectives at Swirrl and so making it easy for software applications to get data in and out of Swirrl is pretty important.

We’re making good progress and we’ll let you know when it’s ready.

New features: item templates, tables of attributes

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:55:00 +0100

We released a couple of new features over the weekend:

Item templates

When you’re creating or editing an item in Swirrl, it’s often the case that you’d like to give it some of the same attributes as other items in the same category. When you’re editing an item, we now show you the attributes that have been set on other visible items in the same category, so that you can fill them in if you want to.

You don’t need to set values for all these attributes – it’s just intended as a guide, to avoid you having to keep referring back to the other items in the category to remember what attributes to set. Any attributes that are left blank when you save will just remain unset.

For example, if you have a category for ‘expenses’, for each individual expense you might normally set the date, amount spent, VAT, description, what form the receipt is in, and who is claiming the expense. Now, after the first expense item has been created, you wont need to remember this list: when users who can see your original item edit another expense, these attributes will be presented to them.

Attribute tables

We’ve added a new way to view lists of items in Swirrl (i.e. search results, items tagged with a particular keyword, or items in a category etc.)

By default the results displayed in the way you’re used to: as a list of item names.

However, if you prefer, you can now choose to see a table of the attributes of the items by clicking the link ‘show attributes’. This helps you see, at a glance, more details about each item without having to view them all one by one.

What is the semantic web?

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:35:00 +0100

A few days ago I posted an article about the semantic web on the ThinkAboutTech blog, which I thought readers of SwirrlSpeak might find interesting:

Semantics are important. They always have been and they always will be, because they are fundamental to the process of communication. What’s been changing recently is the means that we use to record and communicate information, especially with the advent of the internet…

(read the rest of the article)

New blog on the web of data

Tue, 26 May 2009 18:43:00 +0100

As regular readers of SwirrlSpeak will have noticed, we’ve long been convinced of the benefits of the semantic web and linked data – and indeed those technologies underly the design of Swirrl.

I’ve just started a new blog where I’ll be exploring these topics in more depth: http://www.webofdatablog.com. Please take a look!

Swirrl on Future Changes

Sun, 17 May 2009 11:49:00 +0100

At Swirrl, we’re big fans of Stewart Mader’s excellent blog on wiki practices and adoption, Future Changes. So, it was an honour that he accepted a contribution from us about finding information at work.

If a question about general knowledge comes up in conversation, it’s easy to immediately look it up on the web on your laptop or phone. If you’re watching a film and you can’t place where else you’ve seen one of the actors, you can instantly look it up on IMDB. You can even use services like Shazam to identify songs. Finding things out at work should also be this easy, but it normally isn’t. Although the information you want probably exists somewhere in your organization, it’s often scattered across multiple systems or you might not have access to the specific shared drive where it lives….

Read the whole article here.

We’ll be contributing more material to Stewart’s blog over the coming months.

New features: branding and improved permission handling

Thu, 14 May 2009 13:52:00 +0100

We released a couple more new features yesterday. One feature that people have been asking us for for is the ability to customise the appearance of Swirrl to match your own company style (or “branding” for short). So now you can upload your own logo and choose from a list of colour schemes. We’ve been taking advantage of that for our own internal Swirrl account – a change is as good as a rest and we’re using the rather attractive blue colour scheme at the moment, rather than the default grey and orange.

Another small improvement is to give each individual user the chance to configure the default access permissions assigned to any new items they create in Swirrl. You can still adjust these permissions item by item, but this means that if you are in the marketing group, say, then for example you could set up Swirrl so that everything you create is visible to everyone in the company but editable only by marketing group members. Hopefully this will save some of our users some time by making permission management easier.

There are a few other minor things – have a poke around the system and see what you think. These include allowing administrators to see the real names and emails of the users of the account (as well as their screen-names). That makes it easier to match up the email addresses of the people you invited to the screen-names of the actual users – useful in cases where people use nicknames rather than real names to identify themselves. And we’ve made it easy for normal users (ie. not administrators) to see a list of the groups they are in.

Taming your inbox

Mon, 04 May 2009 08:51:00 +0100

Email works great for short messages intended for one person, where you just want to alert the recipient to something, and no further discussion is required. But when you start to include more people, and they all start chipping in with their responses, email starts to break down as an efficient medium.

Say there are five other people in your team, and you want to get their feedback on a report that you intend to send to a client. If you send out an email to all of them, asking for their advice, you might get 3 or 4 responses back: some with revised versions of the report, some with notes at the end and some with comments interspersed within your original text. A couple of people might have ‘CC’d everyone else in your team when they replied, where others might have just replied directly to you.

I’m sure you can see where this is leading. Your team ends up with multiple conflicting versions of the report, some of which aren’t available to everyone involved. Holding a meaningful discussion over the content quickly becomes impossible.

What’s more, some of your team might be busy doing something else more urgent, and as your group email discussion progresses, you’re just annoying them with unnecessary interruptions. Conversely, because not everyone included the whole team in their replies, some people miss out on messages which may have sparked an idea or perhaps included topics where they could have contributed useful insights.

Using tools which provide you with central hub for communication (such as wiki-style applications), instead of directly contacting each individual person, allows you to reduce the number of connections involved. This, in turn, reduces the number of interruptions and the number versions of the document that are generated, making the discussion much more manageable.

Email is not entirely redundant: it still makes sense to send out an email to your team-mates, pointing them to the discussion in your chosen collaboration tool (e.g. a url to a wiki page). But from that point on, it’s more efficient to hold the discussion entirely within an application designed for that purpose.

"Making information easier to use is the Holy Grail"

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:50:00 +0100

So says Stefan Kohn of FujiFilm Europe, quoted in a recent EMC-sponsored report published by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

“Organisational Agility: How business can survive and thrive in turbulent times” describes a survey and interviews with business executives on how they can stay competitive in a rapidly changing environment.

A few common themes come out strongly. Most think they need to be able to respond more quickly to new opportunities or new threats. “Rapid decision making and execution” is the most important trait needed to make this possible – and one of the key enabling factors is having access to the right information at the right time. “The importance of being quick to leverage information resounds throughout the survey results”.

We agree!

The report continues: “Most companies need to make more progress in transforming their knowledge processes to ﬁt the demands of the knowledge age…only 30% indicate that they have the needed information to conduct their duties effectively”.

“Topping the list [of required tools] are knowledge management and collaboration systems, something that 81% of those polled indicate will go furthest in spurring innovation.”

It’s good to hear that the Economist and a group of prominent businesses are now starting to recognize the urgent need for the kind of tool we’re building here at Swirrl.

Introducing grrid.js: an open source javascript grid control

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:15:00 +0100

We use quite a lot of open source software at Swirrl: Linux, Ruby On Rails, Prototype, MySql, Apache, Passenger (among others), so it’s in the spirit of open source in general that we’re releasing grrid.js.

It’s an open source, javascript, spreadsheet-like grid control that we originally developed for Swirrl to help with importing data that users currently have in spreadsheets, or for creating lots of new items at once just by typing into the ‘cells’. We’ve spent quite a bit of effort making sure that the grid responds snappily even when you’re dealing with a lot of data (i.e. tens of thousands of rows).

You can read more about grrid.js, see a demo, or download it at grridjs.org. If you want to contribute, or have any comments, please get in touch.