The Vision ThangNow that having Visions is a Good Thing, and no longer an occasion for the natty overcoat with the buttons up the back, every project needs one. But more practically, XP projects need some sort of shared hallucination in order to counteract the centrifugal pressure of short-term iterations and small-scale user stories, reminding the participants of what the long-term goal is, and why it is important. So come drink the Kool-Aid -- here is... The SKUA Vision The points below could still use some work -- they still have a CTO-ish vagueness, and the stench of powerpoint is about them The whatThe SKUA project will design and implement an architecture for saving and sharing annotations concerning astronomical and other resources. These annotations -- called 'Claims' -- will include bookmarks, recommendations, saved queries and more. A key part of the architecture is that these Claims can be shared with collaborators and colleagues. These claims are stored in 'Semantic Annotation Collections', or SACs, which can be queried via a RESTful API. These SACs will also have some basic astronomical semantic knowledge, which will enhance the queries. SKUA's target audience is application programmers, which will allow them to enhance their applications with shared annotations. As part of proving the architecture, and to further exploit the possibilities of semantic technologies, we will create two applications layered on top of the SKUA infrastructure. Spacebook will be a collaborative research environment for astronomers. A suggestions server will support applications which wish to browse the VO registry, by suggesting VO resources which are related to a proffered resource. The whyThere are several applications within the VO which allow users to create annotations, and whose users would benefit from having the annotations shared to their colleagues. SKUA will be valuable to these application authors because it will make it easy for them to add functionality which is valuable to their users. As well, the pervasive use of even lightweight semantic knowledge will create awareness of the possibilties of this technology. SuccessOur first goal is to create a usable annotations infrastructure, and we will have succeeded if one or more VO application authors incorporate support for the infrastructure in their application. Based on this, we will create the Spacebook application, and we will have succeeded if XXX users create accounts on it. The suggestions server application will succeed if one or more VO applications use its services in a deployed version of that application.
There is the Vision. Go forth and hallucinate.
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