Kaleidoscope Media Project
Describe your project – 1800 characters:
The 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.



