AgAlerts - a use for BLIPs?
Tim Lynch
hi everyone,
A few days back, Mark and Russ were kind enough to introduce me to y'all, but I've not had the time until this afternoon to properly respond to this list. and before I forget, thanks Russ and Mark for inviting me to join you all!
I had initially ping'ed Russ with a question about LLUP and BLIP development, having just come across one of his posts on the subject. The idea behind BLIPs seems custom-made for a notification service a few colleagues and I have been kicking around recently. We're all in the field of agriculture and related services such as cooperative extension; we are interested in exploring a notification service that would augment and improve the email-blogs-portals-whatnot we're now using.
I've been drafting a little story that tries to layout our ideas in layman's terms - a bit corny perhaps, but it gets to the ideas we're advocating. As you read through my story below, substitute "BLIP" everywhere you see "AgAlert" and, well, you get idea. Without further ado:
----
Joe Farmer is inspecting his apple orchard one morning when he finds a strange beetle on one of his apple trees. He's worried it's the dreaded McIntosh bug everyone's been talking about. The McIntosh bug has been the scourge of the west coast apple industry for a few years, but hasn't been seen east of the Rockies - Joe's orchard is in Indiana. If Joe is right, this would be the first sighting of the bug in this part of the country.
Joe calls his local Extention agent, Fred Ex, and flips him a foto of the bug. The agent agrees with Joe's hunch, it's the dreaded McIntosh bug. Fred call Mary, head of Purdue's Ag school library and asks for help in activating AgAlert.
Mary sends an initial Alert to the National Ag Library in Washington, DC where the init-Alert is seen by several NAL staffers:
1. A web page is readied on the NAL web site to house the info that will soon be accretting. This web page will be the official home page for "The Infestation".
2. The Alert, now containing a reference to the NAL web page, is broadcast over AgAlert. AgAlert is subscribed to by the national Cooperative Extension system, the USDA, Ag and Vet schools (primarily via respective libraries), farmers and growers, and agri-businesses.
3. NAL staffers fire up the deep-web rake, a deep-web mining tool that scours scholarly repositories not normally indexed by the likes of Google, to search for relevant articles on the McIntosh bug and associated topics. The rake will run for a day or two and will itself send out AgAlerts marking its progress. (NAL is prototyping something like the rake at this time, basically a tool to simplify searching the multitude of limited-access scholarly databases and index/reference services.)
4. NAL, having previously negotiated with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft for those organizations to provide a 'quick-link' for high-priority AgAlerts, sends a special AgAlert to the agencies containing a list of anticipated keywords to be tied to the new Infestation web page. The Alert specifies a 'one-week' lifetime meaning that for the next week, any user search that includes a supplied keyword will return the NAL page at or near the top of the hits list.
Within an hour of the initial sighting by Joe, AgAlerts have reached the west coast (the Alerts themselves are, of course, near instantaneous, but we're allowing for Joe's call to Fred, Fred's call to the Mary, etc., etc.). West Coast folks have, over the previous few years, compiled a ton of stuff on the McIntosh bug including lots of anecdotal field-tested treatments and approaches, mostly available online but scattered over various web sites. The West Coast folks Alert back to NAL with some links to their content; the NAL web page is automatically updated and another broadcast AgAlert goes out. The West Coast folks will be Alerting additional links as they dig 'em up.
A couple of hours have gone by - Fred has telephoned some west coast experts and arranged for a video-conference tomorrow morning, hosted by NAL, that will allow any interested party to plug in. The NAL web page is again updated per the v-conf; another AgAlert is broadcast. County agents across the midwest have been following the Alerts and are now busy calling their local orchard owners to make sure they know about the video-conference (which they already do since they've been getting the Alerts as well :)
Over the course of the next few weeks, the activity dies down a bit as the situation is brought under control. AgAlerts continue to be broadcast on regional workshops and meetings, but AgAlert filtering allows remote parties to easily filter out the irrelevant broadcasts.
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so, that's the idea: a notification service for ag-related happenings. you can imagine such a notification service being used for a variety of situations from notification of local flood/fire situations to outbreaks of avian flu.
Still trying to catch up on LLUP/BLIP - so far August seems to be the month of meetings-from-hell ... but, from what I see, I think we have a couple of use-cases that have not been articulated:
1. We'd like to associate a series of Alerts as pertaining to a given "thread" much as we do with email. That'd allow someone to filter out everything pertaining to a given thread if they wanted. Do Alerts have GUIDs? Can one Alert ref. another's GUID as the parent or root? We'd prefer something like a GUID over using keywords in headers as it's too easy to re-use keywords.
2. We need to identify locality so a Alert can be tagged as "of interest only to the midwest" (we use the NAL thesaurus as our controlled vocabulary to translate terms like 'midwest' to [a canonical list of midwest state names] ). ... Maybe this need should be translated to: allow Alerts to contain custom headers that are simply ignored if not understood? That way, our AgAlerts could contain a 'Locale' header or somesuch. (I'm sure we'll come up with attributes beyond Locale as we move forward.)
appreciate your thoughts and ideas!
looking forward to working with everyone
Tim Lynch
Director, IT
231 Emerson Hall
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607.227.6498
tj...@cornell.edu
M. David Peterson
Just rushing out the door (see previous email), but I quickly read the first few bits. This is FANTASTIC!
Whats even better, is the fact that you have chosen a different name than Blip, as Blip Messaging is not a standard in and of itself, and instead an implementation of the LLUP spec. With this in mind, the very fact that you have adopted "AgAlert" will help others understand that this doesn't have ANYTHING to do with the chosen names (LLUP or Blip), and instead a core standard in which can be implemented under any chosen name one might choose to implement it under.
This is an important point that I was hoping an opportunity such as this would arise such that folks could easily understand that there is nothing binding and gagging them to any of the chosen names we have focused on, and instead simply a standard foundation to build and extend from.
I will read this more thoroughly after I have finished my "quest" mentioned in my last email.
Looking forward to it! :D
/M:D
M. David Peterson
http://mdavid.name | http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2354
Sylvain Hellegouarch
For some reason my Thunderbird chew your message and hid it. Go figure.
Anyway welcome around here. It's quite a use case you've raised so I
need to take some time to go through it and comment it. Will do asap :)
Welcome again!
- Sylvain
Russell Miles
I agree wholeheartedly with Mark, this is a great example of a specific domain where BLIPs can be flavored to whatever is needed for the particular system. Very excited about this, from my perspective I think LLUP coloured to an AgAlert system would be a perfect fit. See my comments on your use case below:
-------------------
Joe Farmer is inspecting his apple orchard one morning when he finds a strange beetle on one of his apple trees. He's worried it's the dreaded McIntosh bug everyone's been talking about. The McIntosh bug has been the scourge of the west coast apple industry for a few years, but hasn't been seen east of the Rockies - Joe's orchard is in Indiana. If Joe is right, this would be the first sighting of the bug in this part of the country.
Joe calls his local Extention agent, Fred Ex, and flips him a foto of the bug.
>> Russ's comment: Why couldn't Joe just create a private message alert (basically a blip) that points to the photo. See my further comments as to why this could be useful...
The agent agrees with Joe's hunch, it's the dreaded McIntosh bug.
>> Russ's comment: And then the agent could send a blip back to Joe with a cross reference to the original blip indicating that he agrees (signed of course for tracking purposes)
Fred calls Mary, head of Purdue's Ag school library and asks for help in activating AgAlert.
>> Fred could then forward the original blip, now escalted with a confirmation blip (using the Guids mentioned below to associate between blips)
Mary sends an initial Alert to the National Ag Library in Washington, DC where the init-Alert is seen by several NAL staffers:
1. A web page is readied on the NAL web site to house the info that will soon be accretting. This web page will be the official home page for "The Infestation".
2. The Alert, now containing a reference to the NAL web page, is broadcast over AgAlert. AgAlert is subscribed to by the national Cooperative Extension system, the USDA, Ag and Vet schools (primarily via respective libraries), farmers and growers, and agri-businesses.
3. NAL staffers fire up the deep-web rake, a deep-web mining tool that scours scholarly repositories not normally indexed by the likes of Google, to search for relevant articles on the McIntosh bug and associated topics. The rake will run for a day or two and will itself send out AgAlerts marking its progress. (NAL is prototyping something like the rake at this time, basically a tool to simplify searching the multitude of limited-access scholarly databases and index/reference services.)
4. NAL, having previously negotiated with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft for those organizations to provide a 'quick-link' for high-priority AgAlerts, sends a special AgAlert to the agencies containing a list of anticipated keywords to be tied to the new Infestation web page. The Alert specifies a 'one-week' lifetime meaning that for the next week, any user search that includes a supplied keyword will return the NAL page at or near the top of the hits list.
Within an hour of the initial sighting by Joe, AgAlerts have reached the west coast (the Alerts themselves are, of course, near instantaneous, but we're allowing for Joe's call to Fred, Fred's call to the Mary, etc., etc.). West Coast folks have, over the previous few years, compiled a ton of stuff on the McIntosh bug including lots of anecdotal field-tested treatments and approaches, mostly available online but scattered over various web sites. The West Coast folks Alert back to NAL with some links to their content; the NAL web page is automatically updated and another broadcast AgAlert goes out. The West Coast folks will be Alerting additional links as they dig 'em up.
A couple of hours have gone by - Fred has telephoned some west coast experts and arranged for a video-conference tomorrow morning, hosted by NAL, that will allow any interested party to plug in. The NAL web page is again updated per the v-conf; another AgAlert is broadcast. County agents across the midwest have been following the Alerts and are now busy calling their local orchard owners to make sure they know about the video-conference (which they already do since they've been getting the Alerts as well :)
Over the course of the next few weeks, the activity dies down a bit as the situation is brought under control. AgAlerts continue to be broadcast on regional workshops and meetings, but AgAlert filtering allows remote parties to easily filter out the irrelevant broadcasts.
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I love this use case, and I think it would work perfectly with a selection of different scalings as to where blips (or AgAlerts in the domain terms) would be present. I think a guid so that agalerts can be cross-referenced into a form of thread (especially if you include the initial steps, because then the whole shebang is tied with signatures to the individuals involved - perhaps for legal purposes, or even for credit?).
Any thoughts from the team?
Russ Miles
http://www.russmiles.com
http://www.UMLRanch.com
http://www.SOARanch.com
xmlh...@gmail.com
fantastic! :D
Tim, + all of those not subscribed to the LiveClip mailing list,
As per my most recent post (sent to both the LiveClipboard as well as
this list) this seems like a FANTASTIC use-case for integration of
LiveClipboard as well. If you agree, it would probably be worth
joining the Live-Clip list as well:
http://discussms.hosting.lsoft.com/archives/live-clip.html
Just in case, a demo of LiveClipboard can be found @
http://rayozzie.spaces.live.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/liveclipsample/clipboardexample.html
Explanation of the above @
http://rayozzie.spaces.live.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/liveclipsample/techPreview.html
Various ScreenCasts @
http://rayozzie.spaces.live.com/editorial/rayozzie/demo/liveclip/screencast/liveclipdemo.html