Mirko Gontek from the University of Cologne is working on human-computer interaction and 3D-information visualization. We are going to be sharing Connotea data with him to work on. The data will just be the publicly available data that one might otherwise extract using the API, but hopefully making it available in bulk will help him with his research. He has set up a quick visualisation demo using the API. You can see some screenshots and can download a java visualiser. I didn’t get it tow work on my machine just yet, but I’ll be meeting with him at the weekend and I think there may be more coming out of this corner in the future.
As Mirko points out on his page, waiting for calls from the Connotea API can take a while. The speed issue with Connotea is definitely a concern. There are a few things that cause this problem. The main issue is that we allow privacy and each time someone calls up a page we need to calculate what they can and can’t view. This added to what at the moment is a somewhat naive way of dealing with caching are mainly responsible for our lag times. We do have an extra machine that we can throw at the problem and we are trying to fit it into our server room right now. We may make this just serve API requests, which should help, but in the long term a bit of back-end redesign is going to be required.
Anyway, have a look at Mirko’s page and give him some feedback if you have any. The issue of visualizing complex data sets is going to be a huge challenge for many areas of science. Yesterday we met Tom Carden from Stamen Design for lunch yesterday and the discussion ranged over many of these issues. I don’t know what the solution is going to be, but I do hope that we can create some nice ways of interrogating Connotea that can help in understanding the information that is contained in there.
I should also mention that if you are working on any interesting projects that might benefit from a data set like connotea’s then I am always happy to discuss the project. There are some strict limitations, such as us not giving personal user details or private data, but in principle I am open to discussion.
I don’t get any results from thevisualization demo, is it broken, or are there some tricks to using it?
Hi Matthew,
Though Mirko doesn’t mention it on his site, you need to install java3d. I have a mac and I followed the instructions on this page and I got it to work.
- Ian
May 2008 situation: which jar should I download for Mac OS 10.5.1 Leopard, from all those win jars on the Sun page? Harwig’s instructions are almost 2 years old. For instance,
So it seems important to know how to do this without frying up my Powerbook! :)