Kaleidoscope
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:
$2,000,000Total cost of project including all sources of funding:
$2,000,000Expected amount of time to complete project:
4 yearsThe Kaleidoscope Media Project proposes to assist media producers with making their content timely, ubiquitous, and enduring. This goal will be accomplished by providing a peer-to-peer semantic database and web services system that can build upon existing software solutions and tie them together to create a unified media creation and distribution platform. For more information about the underlying technology, please visit: http://my-kaleidoscope.org/platform.html. This technology has been in the development process for over a year.
The system built on this technology would allow users to access a flexible database that permits users to organize their data in a free-form manner appropriate to their content. This size of the content can range from just a simple piece of information (e.g. the sky is cloudy in Chicago) to more elaborate documents. By encoding these facts and documents on a very basic level, people can then annotate, process, share, and interconnect these items without disrupting any of the original structures. Furthermore, with this information present in known structures, the information can be processed and presented in a variety of different ways.
The key point is this-- data on blogs, webpages, wikis, etc. is locked in its original format. Trying to reprocess this data or convert it to another format in another system is a hard task. By providing a system that can do this well, data becomes interconnected and reactive to the world and people around it. Thus, the content produced by journalism affects you, and you affect the journalism, but not in just in existing structures like discussion forums or e-mails. In this remixing process, everyone has a voice and a view of the world to share.
0 commentsHow will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Kaleidoscope Media Project
The Kaleidoscope Media Project will change how people produce and interact with content. There are three key components to this-- an easy-to-use database, event triggers, and ubiquitous communication. With these key components in place, the content becomes a part of a changing kaleidoscope of content that changes its form for the community it serves.
First, the content must be organized in some sort of manner, but it is difficult to agree on a universal organization. By accepting the fact that groups do not always agree on organization and by making it easy to bridge these differences and make this structure adaptable to change, these ideas provide the basis for usable data store. Furthermore, because content providers are not technical experts, it is very important to make the data store user friendly from the ground up. This is accomplished by using some web 2.0 ideas of tagging and assigning properties to various entities (without going into technical details). Therefore, by providing an easy-to-use semantic database to store the content, anyone can be a content provider for any community (topical or geographical) who can be relevant to the communities they serve.
Second, event triggers are another cornerstone to this system. Part of content consumption is based on sequence of events. Events important to one person may not be as important to events of another person. For instance, one person may want to be alerted when something happens that is *topically* relevant to them (e.g. sports scores, stock quotes, etc.), while another person may want to be alerted when something happens that is *geographically* relevant to them (e.g. crime in one area, community meeting for a referendum, legislation affecting my town, etc.). More importantly, this is not just about receiving the data, one will have the ability to write small computer programs that can process the data to produce new data. By allowing both content providers and content consumers to easily react to the data, it can be processed in a more meaningful and timely manner.
Third, data ubiquity is an absolute necessity in the world we live today. Media is the correct word to describe the output of content because there is a medium that is appropriate for a given community. People traveling may need audio delivery of content, while people on public transportation may need content adjusted for small, low-resolution screens. People with accessibility needs may need to interact with data in a different manner according to their abilities. Other people awash in massive amounts of data may need visualizations and pictures that represent the data. It may also be necessary to translate parts of content to other languages and other cultures. By building on the idea of a flexible data store and reacting to changes in data, shifting data from one format to another across various delivery mechanisms becomes very possible.
Therefore, through the use of an easy-to-use database, event triggers, and ubiquitous communication, data can be produced and consumed by any community in any medium.
0 commentsHow is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.)
Kaleidoscope Media Project
The idea is based on the technologies starting to build around the semantic web. Probably the most visible example of this vision is from a company called Metaweb who has a website called Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/. There are also various initiatives by academia and standards bodies to make the semantic web a reality (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/). The Kaleidoscope Media Project is another instantiation of these ideas but in a package accessible to non-technical people. Furthermore, it will be an open-source (i.e. public domain) project. In contrast to Freebase, system access and data are free but the technology is proprietary.
Comparing the idea to existing news and information sites, the difference is what happens behind the scenes rather than in front. Imagine a journalist submitting an article with an accompanying table of numbers and some photos. For the traditional website, the programmer would query the database to pull up the article and the photos and tables...and that would be it. User interaction would be limited to hyperlinks and maybe a discussion forum. With the Kaleidoscope Media Project, these items run through multiple encoders (partially manual and partially automatic) that will then connect the content with not only local content but content connected to other Kaleidoscope peers. For the article, the encoders would include a grammar parser, web formater, annotated reviews, etc. For the photo, encoders could include image processing analysis and identifying annotations (e.g. who is that person on the left). For the table of numbers, the encoders could include linking the data to existing data based on column headers or whom or what the data represents and ways to graph and visualize the data. The possibilities are endless, but the important thing to remember is that each data item (big and small) connects to existing data and changes in data can trigger actions that affect other data. This data can be relevant, remixed, and reactive...this is the essence of journalism...presenting information that affects people lives.
It is true that these things exist in various pieces, but the Kaleidoscope Media Project brings it all together into one system.
0 commentsWhat experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
Kaleidoscope Media Project
I feel that I am qualified to bring this vision to fruition. I already have spent over a year developing this system, and is still being constructed. Additionally, I have made a presentation on the ubiquity of data using a small subset of Kaleidoscope and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com). This software was presented at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in New York City (details here: http://en.oreilly.com/webexny2008/public/schedule/detail/5266) and is available upon request as a live demo here: http://my-kaleidoscope.org/twitterbase.html.
Secondly, I have had experience in the world of traditional print media during younger years working in a public library and working for a neighborhood newspaper delivering newspapers. Although I did not create the content, I was fully aware of how people consumed the content and what was important to them. I know about the importance of content organization, the credibility of sources, and the ability to find right information at the right time. I am also very willing to surround myself with experts in journalism and media creation to make sure that I am making relevant tools that not only easy to use but are practical and make journalists' lives easier.
Finally, I am someone who wants to work with others. I want to build a community of developers and content providers to make this system real. Even if this idea was not funded, I would be very interested in working with current and past winners to see how I could use my developing technology to improve their projects. My personal goal is to make technology accessible to people, and with the Kaleidoscope Media Project, I feel that I can serve the field of journalism by making this really cool tool that will make a difference.
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