User:Martind/Document Log Discovery Platform

Problem Statement

We're seeing an increase in the publication of vast corpuses of data logs, often in the form of message archives, usually in a structured message format. They're all quite overwhelming: how to make sense of such a vast amount of text? How to identify sections that are relevant?

• Can we allow large number of interested parties (anyone really) to annotate these documents?
  • What kinds of annotations do we want to make? (Information structure)
  • How can we make that easy? (Tools)
  • Can we identify good conventions and techniques for the above that are more generally applicable? (Patterns of use)
• Finally, can we think of these functions as a layer on top of mere archives, and construct them as a physically separate service?

Exemplary Publications

• WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs
  • Document URL: http://warlogs.wikileaks.org/id/BCD499A0-F0A3-2B1D-B27A2F1D750FE720/ (archive.org)
  • Document ID: BCD499A0-F0A3-2B1D-B27A2F1D750FE720
• WikiLeaks Embassy Cables
  • Document URL: http://213.251.145.96/cable/2010/02/10COPENHAGEN69.html
  • Document ID: 10COPENHAGEN69
  • Browsers: cablesearch.org,
• http://spacelog.org/
  • Document URL: http://apollo13.spacelog.org/01:06:43:11/#log-line-110591
  • Document ID: 01:06:43:11/#log-line-110591 ("log-line-110591" alone doesn't seem to suffice to construct a link)

Observations

Editorial Functions

• It seems useful to be able to link/group individual messages
• It seems useful to be able to annotate content (with text, links)
• It seems useful to be able to contribute anonymously
• It seems useful to be able to annotate/qualify editorial contributions by others

Interestingness, Popularity

• What constitutes an "interesting" section of a document is a matter of perspective.
  • Such annotations become more useful if they're linked to a context (e.g. "this cable relates to news story X")
• Relationship between "popular" and "interesting" items:
  • Much easier to establish "popularity" via simple (implicit, explicit) voting mechanisms: Q&A sites, collaborative news sites, click tracking etc.
  • "Interestingness" requires more work, since it is the result of an editorial process. This makes it slower, potentially tedious to demonstrate, and error prone.
  • The latter could however feed into the former: items that are widely perceived as interesting
    • To best accomplish this we should attempt to simplify the workflow of an editorial process.

Interoperability

• Many parties will already build browsers for data log archives, with varying ways of navigating such content.
  • We don't need to duplicate those efforts, but we should integrate with them.

Addressing Schemes for Archives

• Need a shared addressing scheme that works across archives, archive browsers
  • Based on permalinks
• Alternatively: need a method of translating between different addressing schemes
  • Start with a review of link structures of a wide spectrum of archives
• Should publish best practises for a good addressing scheme
  • Document and possibly share the structure of individual addressing schemes
  • Publish recommendations for addressing schemes, terminology used: common conventions help
• ...

Spacelog highlights:

• Addressing schemes become more complex for timeline browsers
• This data log is not just a collection of independent documents, but a sequence of directly related events
• The primary reading mode is in context: items are always presented within a timeline
  • Want to show documents leading up to and succeeding the highlighted documents
• As a consequence, an address is a tuple of a) a document ID or range in the data log and b) a visual offset that anchors the start of the reading position
• This is mostly an artefact of timeline presentation within a browser
  • Want to anchor reading position at the first highlighted document. The reader can then scroll up to get context

Content licenses

• A good discovery platform may want to republish content from linked archives to be able to present them in a coherent manner
  • In the case of data published by governments and NGOs the data may either be in the public domain, or will have an explicit license
  • In the case of document leaks the legal status of this data may not be clear obvious, and there may not be an explicit license

Links

• http://booktwo.org/notebook/openbookmarks/ check these sites for bookmark/annotation conventions
  • http://www.openbookmarks.org/ (focused on ebooks)
    • http://wiki.openbookmarks.org/Bookmark_Exchange_Format