SIMILE projects at MIT

SIMILE projects at MIT

Much like the geocoding application that I wrote about, the SIMILE project at MIT is all about mashups. There are currently seventeen open source projects that are a part of the overall SIMILE project. According to the MIT website, "SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets." (http://simile.mit.edu).

So far my favorite app is the Exhibit 2.0, a great data/web mashup tool. The MIT site description is an ample introduction: "Exhibit is a three-tier web application framework written in Javascript, which you can include like you would include Google Maps. If you just want to show a few hundred records of data on maps, timelines, scatter plots, interactive tables, etc., why bother learning SQL, ASP, PHP, CGI, or whatever when you can just use Exhibit? To use Exhibit, you write: a simple data file, and an HTML file in which you specify how the data should be shown. Data + Presentation. That's all there is to publishing, as it should be." Check out some of the examples on the site.

My second favorite app is really two related applications Timline and Timeplot. Both are DHTML-based apps that allow you to plot a list of time-related events across a visual timeline. This can be used to show how an event unfolded, with one of their examples being the JFK Assasination showing the events as they occured, minute by minute on the day it happened as well as the followup happenings. You could also use this to build family history timelines, company histories, project documentation and many other uses. If you have a syslog-ng database that consolidates all your server syslog events into a single DB, then you could take the event correlation report that shows how an application failure took place, and timeplot it so you can have a pretty picture to show your pointy-haired boss, that he can take to his boss and they can hang color printouts of on their wall. Heck, you could even plot your income and expenses to show just how there's just too much month at the end of the money.

I guess by now you are thinking I'm a mad, mad, mad mashups addicted fiend, but that would not be true. It's just that there are some very cool, very useful tools out there that us non-programmer, sysadmin types can use to produce helpful results, cranked out by mashup obsessed programmer types (thanks guys!!).
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