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)
• ...

Exemplary Publications

• WikiLeaks datalog dumps
  • Iraq War Logs
  • Embassy Cables
• http://spacelog.org/
  • http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1958292 "I would love to get an in-depth technical explanation of the requests and procedures -- how all this stuff works and insights into the troubleshooting process."
• etc

Observations

• What constitutes an "interesting" section of a document is a matter of perspective.
  • Thus, such annotations become more useful if they're linked to a context (e.g. "this cable relates to news story X")
• Many parties will already build browsers for such publications, with varying ways of navigating such content.
  • We don't need to duplicate those efforts, but we should integrate with them.
• ...

Requirements

• Need a shared addressing scheme that works across document browsers
  • Based on permalinks
  • we can translate between different approaches
• Need ways to link/group individual messages
• Need ways to identify level of "interestingness" (e.g. voting, cf. Q&A sites)
• Need ways to annotate content (with text, links)
• Contribution should be possible anonymously
• ...