Time is the wisest counselor of all. ~Pericles Introducing WikiTimeLines.net Sunday, July 31, 2011
By Jeff Roehl [email protected] We are currently testing this in different browsers. Your participation is encouraged and appreciated. Our goal is to be able to visualize temporal data from any data source. Websites, articles, databases and even whole books, with the least amount of typing possible. This is done by creating rudimentary time-lines without any human intervention and then allowing users to modify and clarify the data to achieve a more beneficial user experience. Two years in the making, our vision is to make all of history contemporaneously visible. As a tool for scholars and students everywhere. WikiTimelines.net consists of a unique combination of technologies. These include (in order of increasing complexity): 1. XML 2. HTML 3. JavaScript 4. Databases arrays 5. Paragraph disambiguation 6. Sentence disambiguation 7. Date disambiguation At this time, for this beta version, we allow access to some 7 million Wikipedia articles. We are doing this to test this technology and incrementally improve it over the upcoming weeks. The disambiguation systems is so complex that it will never be perfect. But over time, with enough participation it can be incrementally improved it, to such an extent that it will become almost indistinguishable from being completely accurate. Our first goal is to continue tuning the date disambiguation to the point where we feel that it is 99% accurate. There is no way to measure this, of course, it is a matter of perception on our part. We feel we are at 95% at this point. After this we plan on adding the following features: 1. Pictures will be added to the time-lines as exploding thumbnails, that expand (zoom) when clicked. 2. Combine time-lines, so for example, we can place all of the great Renaissance artists on a timeline, to visually see how this period of art history progressed. Even creating a comprehensive timeline of world history (the master timeline) 3. Allow users to create their own time-lines for personal or commercial purposes 4. Allow users the ability to download and host their own time-lines wherever they want 5. Creation of a timeline "widget" which can be placed on any web-page, that will automatically either timeline the page it is placed on, or any website it is pointed to Most of the work to implement this technology has been finished. But because of the complexity of this project, we need to layer these features on over the upcoming weeks, and test them, step by step. Otherwise, we will miss something and have a glut of issues to deal with, which may be fatal, forcing us to start over. The back-end of this website is constantly being tweaked, broken, fixed and then re-tested. This is very time consuming and labor intensive. Warning: We don't, at this time support dates before 1000 AD. There are several reasons for this: 1. Nothing really happened between September 4, A.D. 476, the fall of Rome, and the invention of the printing press in 1440, other than Charlemagne and the crusades. 2. Parsing dates with years that are less the four digits would take 10 times the processing time than just 4 digits. It just doesn't make sense to employ resources to this undertaking at this time. 3. As years get shorter, they are increasingly difficult, for the computer, logically, to parse and disambiguate, directly from texts. 4. As dates get closer, going back in time, to 1 AD, databases and browsers have a differing results and capacities understanding these dates. 1 AD to 9 AD is particularly dicey. Calendars changed, and some systems just throw errors when confronted with these date ranges. So even though we know that Julius Caesar was born on 13 July 100 BC and Cleopatra died August 12, 30 BC, the date disambiguator will not recognise these as dates as it only works with 4 digit years. Many systems don't even recognize individual dates before 1 BC, many only recognize years before this. We would like to go back to 10 AD, and we will attempt to at a later date. Suggestions, comments, criticism, errors and omissions are all welcome. Post yours in the "Discuss" section on the top menu, or shoot me and email at [email protected] Thanks Jeff Roehl [email protected] (818) 912-7530 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SIMILE Widgets" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/simile-widgets?hl=en.
