The Ensemble project has made extensive use of SIMILE Exhibit to produce web pages that support faceted browsing. The SIMILE project is a collaboration between MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) seeking to develop “robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets“.
SIMILE’s Exhibit is a Semantic Web toolkit allowing anyone with a beginner to intermediate level of web page development to produce functionally rich semantic pages based on their data collections. Exhibit is aimed more at the enthusiast with a bare-bones knowledge of HTML, rather than the experienced computer scientist or professional web programmer/designer.
The toolkit comes in the form of a set of powerful JavaScript libraries that, when referenced with a line in the page’s header, loads and scans the HTML for special Exhibit HTML tags. These tags tell Exhibit where to find its data collections and how they should be displayed and manipulated using faceted browsing (a semantic technique where data items are filtered and analysed based upon their attributes).
Exhibit’s visualisations are both varied and powerful. Data items can be displayed as a basic list of records (fully styled with HTML and CSS), turned into tables with sortable columns, plotted on a Google Map (assuming geo-location data is available), mapped to a scrolling timeline (assuming dates or date ranges are available), or rendered as a time-based graph. Other visualisations are also being worked on by Exhibit programmers.
- http://simile.mit.edu/ — the Exhibit page at MIT.
- http://www.simile-widgets.org/ — the new SIMILE Widgets site, the project pages for developing and documenting SIMILE’s work in the Open Source.
- Basic Exhbits:
- Timelines:
- http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/ — JDK assassination timeline.
- UK governments and education (this example includes custom JavaScript software, written by the Ensemble team).
- Maps:
- Presidents of the United States, and their birth places.
- Flags of the world.
- Braer oil tanker accident (this example uses custom JavaScript developed by Ensemble to enhance Exhibit).
- Other examples:
- LJMU dance performance photos.
- Demo LJMU law lecture, with semantic notes controlled by a YouTube video (this example makes extensive use of custom JavaScript to extend the basic Exhibit functionality).
