SIMILE Timeline

The first session I went to was the SIMILE Timeline building block session, as per Mary's request. By Heather Natour, engineering manager at Bb.

SIMILE stands for Semantic Interoperability of Metadata nad Information in unLike EnvironmentsJoint open source by MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL

Visualizing time-based events, draggable, different viewsPopulate from CSV, XML file, and JSON (whatever that is), and regular add event buttonBottom scrolls the month, Top spans by week.

Example was showing what events on at the Olympics at the same time. It's a content area item for sites

Can specify minutes up to millenium for timeline periodsFor each event, title, description, link and image. Specific events and longer duration times (start date of a way, versus whole period it lasted being displayed)

Part of OSCELOT - freely available - able to be modified for mashups

Note that you can potentially modify the building block to include mashups with web services, etc.

Can it work as a module in Bb community system? Pretty easy to adapt this to make it happen

What happens when saw 20 items are there? scrollbar - size items need work as larger items don't display well

Lots of boring stuff about the code and where the files are stored. Mary can get those from the presentation if she wants.

Will copy correctly - moves files

Preparing for Project NG new user interface
-Toggled page-level instructions
-Contextual menu instead of caret page (where you go to a separate list of actions, like modify test leading to different options)
-New location in the action bar
-New look of data collection pages

Help button can be toggled to hide the information/description at the top - to clean up what's on a page. Not sure if it remembers permanently though.

On list of all the events in the timeline, can have a dropdown with Edit/Delete, etc next to each item instead of at the end of the line (like performance dashboard could have more dropdown information per item)

In general an alright session, though I got the impression any future work will need to happen through open-source, as Bb is washing their hands of it.