Display keyboards shortcuts in MacOSX

Speaking with my mother while using our macs, an idea for a simple but useful (it is usually the case) application emerged. It is difficult for end users to know what happens when using your keyboard especially that it depends on the application which is active. If press ‘F’ in the DVD player it plays fullscreen, but in mplayer it is ‘apple + F’ etc…

This application would display your keyboard on a side of the screen and color keys which leads to an action, if you pass your mouse on a colored key (colors depending on the modifier, ctrl, opt, apple, fn…) the action description appears.

If anyone knows of an existing application or is willing to use the idea to do it himself, notify us here. Thanks!

Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums

“Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums” is a paper written by Susan Chun, Doug Hiwiller, Jennifer Trant and Bruce Wyman. I read it today. I already had seen the presentation of steve.museum at the collaborative web tagging workshop and started a collaborative tagging application for museums myself.

The paper introduce the idea of using tagging as an indexation and catalogisation system for museums artworks. According to their “proof of concept” data, 80% of the terms used in tagging artworks through their prototype were new terms, meaning that they did not appear in annotations of the artwork before.

One quote I enjoyed a lot:

Tagging appeals because it represents a dialogue between the viewer and the work…

It is very true indeed, what else better than language to express ourselves, what else better than terms to describe things. This fits with our definition of tagging (see previous posts) in which the tagging process is viewed as a process of sharing knowledge through the transcription of observations.

Although the design the introduce in the paper (this was the last year’s paper, so the design might have change in between) seems rather unclear. It goes into different descriptions of possible relationships between users, “tags” and images or objects…

Antoher point of difficulty, it looks like they wish to automatize the inclusion process of artworks, meaning having some tools to directly export a museum database to the system, well that’s great, if it is feasable. I would rather create a system in which you add artworks by hand (like in del.icio.us), and add automatic systems for large museums(which can be done separately and specifically). Otherwise the small museums will never get there…

They also seem very concerned by the way to atract people to tag. Making games, interactive, showing the gift of tagging to the community… Well I believe it has to be useful so that people tag. Useful directly for them, as in del.icio.us, or flickr.

Otherwise it was a nice paper to read, refreshing my mind and giving me confidence in the design we started. I wish steve.museum to grow…

TLC model checker

Jochen wuttke pointed a problem in the specifications of the collaborative tagging system, especially in the way TLC was evaluating it. In fact, I didn’t spend enough time on the model checking part of the specifications.

So, I am playing with it to find out how to use efficiently TLC, to get more confidence in the consistency of the specifications. The simple example with one human, one term, one object works. The operations read and write occur and actually generate the expected states. But when we give bigger sets as input of tlc, it has strange behaviors (it does not generate states at all, at least not enough). So there might be a problem in the way we use sets in the specifications (or in the way tlc evaluates them)…

It is painful, but at the same time exciting as I didn’t look at the specs for two months. It seems like a good way to improve my skills with TLA+ before starting to specify other systems.

Once I’ll have the specifications corrected, I’ll put them here. I also need to find a way to use tlc to ’show’ the correctness of the specs… I might try it here too.

Collaborative Tagging Museums

Today I gave a talk in the Master of Communication for Curltural Heritage in Lugano in course held by the curator(Peter Samis) of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The topic was collaborative tagging principles and how to apply this paradigm to museums, linking museums together.

Here are my slides:

taggingmuseums2pages.pdf

Smart Web Id

Ciao, Some students just showed me a project they have done for a new company, smartwebid. This is a great project which gives you a unique identifier to identify yourself on the web (or even outside if you enjoy it…)

Looks like the course Jeff and I gave was useful, Hurrah Ruby on Rails!

here is my id:

And their great logo :