Introducing wikitimelines.net

[Jeff Roehl]

We are at:

http://wikitimelines.net/ 

We are putting this beta website up for testing and general reactions.

Our goal was to make all history in Wikipedia available on timelines. All the information initially placed on the timelines is extracted from information in the Wikipedia articles themselves. It is basically a paragraph, sentence and date parser and disambiguation system.

Our next goal is to get users involved to help incrementally edit/adjust the timelines and help to improve the website in general.

Next month we will be releasing a website widget, that will allow any webmaster to place a fully configurable timeline on any website, that will display a timeline derived from the content of the website it is placed on.

The widget, when placed on the web page will look like this:

<script src="http://wikitimelines.net/H/P/HP40C1A2X.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<div id="HP40C1A2X"></div>

The timeline, of the website, will automatically appear, in the browser, where the above widget (<div> tag) is placed.

Thanks 

Jeff Roehl
jro...@yahoo.com
(818) 912-7530

[David Karger]

Neat!  Can you describe the architecture a little?  Are you automatically generating timeline xml data from the wiki pages?  On demand or some out-of-band process?

I notice you're loading timeline from static.simile.mit.edu .  Probably a bad idea as that machine is not carefully maintained.  I recommend switching to simile-widgets.org

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[Jeff Roehl]

>> Neat!  Can you describe the architecture a little?

If I dont have the Wikipedia article in my database, I retreive it and process it into a timeline on demand.

Problem is, that takes 30 to 60 seconds as I have to run through like 1 million lines of code to do this.

The backend program is 10,000 lines of code.

I have pre-processed 5000 Wikipedia articles, basically all featured articles. So the most searched for will come up fast.

 

Thanks
Jeff Roehl
jro...@yahoo.com
(818) 912-7530

---

From: David Karger <kar...@mit.edu>
To: simile-...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Jeff Roehl <jro...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2012 5:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Simile-Widgets] Introducing wikitimelines.net

[Jeff Roehl]

>> I recommend switching to simile-widgets.org

OMG!

Can you give me the direct whole link to this server?

 

Thanks
Jeff Roehl
jro...@yahoo.com
(818) 912-7530

From: David Karger <kar...@mit.edu>
To: simile-...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Jeff Roehl <jro...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2012 5:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Simile-Widgets] Introducing wikitimelines.net

[Jeff Roehl]

>> On demand or some out-of-band process?

I believe it is on demand, because if you pull up an article that I dont have it, it will retrieve it from wikipedia and then we pound/process it into a timeline, which consists of 15 or so databases.

Then it is displayed. Takes 60 seconds or so.

It really is sort of amazing...

What is a "out-of-band process"?

 

Thanks
Jeff Roehl
jro...@yahoo.com
(818) 912-7530

From: David Karger <kar...@mit.edu>
To: simile-...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Jeff Roehl <jro...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 22, 2012 5:02 PM
Subject: Re: [Simile-Widgets] Introducing wikitimelines.net

[David Karger]

simile-widgets.org/timeline/api/timeline-api.js
see simile-widgets.org/timeline for more info.

[David Van Fleet]

looks like a good contribution
here is my effort  http://people.cti.asu.edu/vanfleet/history/mgt_timeline.htm

[fgalah]

Hi Jeff - this is great, well done! Can you tell me what made you sync multiple timelines rather than adding the new timelines as new bands in a single timeline? Would there be performance advantages / disadvantages to either method? I am interested because we are developing a tool that allows comparison of different themes (e.g. a timeline of photography against a timeline of art). Currently they are different bands on the same timeline. I don't have any working links to show you yet, sorry.

Keep up the good work,

Tim.