Define Twine! « xosfaere

Description

Twine is a service where people can organize content into groups. These groups can be public or private, personal or collaborative. A group is called a twine and every element in the group is called an item. Twine has intrinsic support for specific kinds of items.
This last fact means that Twine has some model of what a person, a place, a note, a document, a book, a video, an image, etc., is. It means Twine does not just see links - it sees things with properties. A link does not have properties, but a book, an image, a place, etc. all do have properties. This is important as it will facilitate semantic search and reasoning about the things in the world of Twine.
Twine has another feature which is that it auto-tags content and can show items tagged in a certain way. Tags are language aware.
Twine allows easy access to all twines created by a user or which a user participates in. A participation does not necessarily mean the user can add items. All activity pertaining to twines is accessible from the users front page and is an easy way to track changes.
To add content to Twine, one can either add items directly via the add item menu button or one can use the Twine bookmarklet to bookmark homepages. These bookmarks then become items which are added to the users items list and any other twine the user chooses to (i.e. twines the user is a member of, and which the user has the right to add items to).
And as a twine can evolve over time (items are added to it), care must be taken to keep it’s up to date, or it must be managed such that only items which are compatible with its may be added.
For every item there is an RDF representation which may be dereferenced via a simple URI address.
That is a short of what Twine is. In the future one can hope for richer semantics, more item types (a twine item type, for example) and richer visualizations, even going beyond the browser to support powerful modes of visual and offline interaction. It would be quite interesting if users could create their own item types, this would mean an explosion in the semantic richness of Twine and would multiply the usefulness of the service. To make that truly relevant, it would need design support so that every item type is matched by a visual template.
Further, templates for item lists could be created, thereby forming twine and item views which are useful for the diversity and perception of content on Twine. One view can’t service all needs.
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Original URL

http://xosfaere.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/define-twine/

http://xosfaere.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/define-twine/