Thing Creation Service (aka Rebirth-Machine)

automatic creation of things from resources (rebirth-machine). Generating persons, projects, topics out of the data collected from adapters

One of the requirements from gnowsis states to create active folders, or active things. To allow this, we will describe our implementation sometime in the future. The extension of the PIMO to represent these active folders will be part of the upcoming PIMO-api ontology. Look out for it in the next months. Contact the developers of gnowsis at some time.

Synchronising by tagging systems and Aperture

Users that have flickr.com or technorati accounts have their mental concepts already entered as tags. Each tag is, per default, a candidate to be an instance of type "topic". Ususally, Tags are topics anyway. Also, the user can manually add tags to any resource on the semantic desktop. These tags should also be included in the mywikitology.

see ApertureDatasources for a list of datasources that create tags and may be used.

Active Folders

Synchronising Folders To Topics / instances. Folders in the file-system can be linked to subjects from the mental model.

• a class is linked to a folder - the sub-folders or files in the folder are instances of the class. Example: the class "Project" is linked to folder "home/john/projects/". All folders on the hard-disk are assumed to be projects.
• an instance is linked to a folder - the sub-folders and sub-files are documents that are describing the instance (pim:hasSubject).

For each case, an editor has to be written in the WikitologyGui and the editor, enabling the user to associate concepts to folders.

The WikitologyService has to watch for changes in these folders (notified by Aperture on recrawling the folders) and move them to the mental models.

The synchronisation can be configured to be in suggested classes/instances mode, where the new things are only candiates, or in confirmed mode.

• synchronisation creates suggestions - the created classes / instances MAY be useful to the user, but don't have to be and should not be visualized at all times
• synchronisation creates classes / instances - the items in the linked folder will always represent something.