Just thought I'd pop my head into my blog to let you know why there is so little I write these days. First of all, I have too much to say, but I haven't got around to sort and group my thoughts for public display ... which is another way of saying that I haven't had the time to get my shit together. I will, soon enough.

The other reason is of course that I've been busy completing off a new search service here at The national Library of Australia that includes the following goodies (consider this a non-visual preview) ;

• Semantic searching, thesaurii lookup and semantic relevance ranking
• XHTML 1.0 Strict, Accessibility level AA
• Two-layer sepearation : Backend is Java, frontend is completely XML / XSLT driven (I'll probably write a small something on why this is cooler than it sounds)
• Usability is driving the requirements, not the other way around (smaller iterative releases with user-testing all the way, baby! I'll probably write a bit about this too at some later stage)

All in all, doing development of new services (in fact, this one is a redevelopment of an old service, but who cares?) the smart way. It has a development name of "Research and Reference", but it will most definitly have a different name when done. See this space at the end of this month.

A note to all those into library things out there : The next iteration (and we're doing small numerous releases, not the big-bang crap of the past) will include another project I've started which is called the HeatEngine, which creates semantic meaning between search-terms people search for (through looking at the activity logs) and our catalog (and all its MARC XML backend glory!), so that when people search for 'Ned Kelly' (famous Australian villain / hero) and the initial database have no record of such, the catalog (with its 8 million records) surely has, and we extract meaning from a) the subject headings of any record associated with 'Ned Kelly', b) regroup our search-results by this group, and Voila! c) Google can suck my Solanum tuberosum.

Until the end of this month, I'll be just a tad busy, but the interesting thing is that we're not stressed out about it. It is a comfertable busy, the one that makes you feel you're doing something right. I'm excited to tell you more about it once it hits the world. I'll let you know when. Until then.

Permalink (Mon, 22 Aug 2005 13:00:00 GMT)| Comments (0) | General