FeedForward at RSP

FeedForwardScott Wilson & Kris Popat

http://getfeedforward.org

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/395227944/sizes/o/

Put up your antennae!

“… I’m not explicitly seeking particular contenthere - I’m establishing finely-tuned-antennae tocatch useful intelligence …”

Paul Walk, on the topic of “discovery todelivery”

A FeedForward view ofinformation flow

Personal informationflows are reallycomplicated and go inboth directions.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/visualizing_social_media_fatigue.php

thankfully things arestarting to converge ina way that makes thingseasier to process andmanage

… thoughconfiguring allthese servicesis stillcomplicated andusers needsupport.

We do some ofthat in theFeedForward app

but we alsocould use somesupport fromservices,registries,etc. (morelater…)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dogbomb/526961087/

FeedForward architectureplan, early 2007

What’s changed?

- “Deposit API”- OAI-PMH- SRU- IESR- XSPF

+ SWORD+ OAI-ORE?+ OpenSearch?+ TiCToCs+ Twitter

Enough of this, show the demo!

Lessons learned

Some “high quality”sources can stillproduce pretty terribleRSS

Its more productive to get the RSS/Atom feeds right than wastetime faffing with OAI-PMH or SRU or weird metadata profiles

Particularly as small development teams like ours aren’t goodat caring effectively interpreting specialised verticalspecifications that require care and attention to detail

http://www.flickr.com/photos/apelad/2210391523/

Registries have proved abit of a problem

We wanted to use registryservices to help new usersget a good batch ofstarting feeds

Except none of them workedout for us

One had a good API, butdidn’t have any stuff init (IESR)

The other had loads ofgood stuff, but no API*(TicTocs)

*to be remedied soon!?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/silver_tusk/1256494428

If you need an API, and want to get people usingit quickly, then steal someone else’s

e.g. Magnolia “mirror” API == Delicious APIe.g.2 SWORD == AtomPub+

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rileyroxx/412683023/

SWORD is cool!

BUT finding this inside it isn’t:

METSMODSDIDLIMS Content PackagingBagitOAI-ORELOMDCQualified DCPRISMOtherUnidentifiedStuff(plus zillions of “profiles” of the above)

Packaging and metadata formats are a mess

Is a simple, reliable, lowest-common-denominatorstandard too much to hope for?

On design:Its easy enough adding morefeatures.

… but its when you take them away thatyou know you’re really gettingsomewhere!

Example: authoring

Sometimes all you really need is a 140-character textbox

We used to have a rich text editor - it was clunky as hell

Now we just have a text box. Its good enough, and quick.

More info, download etc : http://getfeedforward.org

FeedForward is Written in Eclipse/SWT. Uses Rome, RomePropono, some Nebula widgets, and some leftover bits ofPlex, RELOAD etc. It makes very extensive use of theEclipse async job API. Its all up on SVN with an MIT-style license.

Give us feedback, requests, ideas on our trac site @http://trac.cetis.ac.uk/trac.cgi/feedforward