Posted by Bill
Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:00:00 GMT
At the moment our free plan allows the opportunity to make your pages public – accessible to the whole internet – and some of our users have found that feature useful. Unfortunately the most common use of our public pages has turned out to be gaming the search engines. We realise that there is a broad spectrum of activity here and that “offsite SEO” can be a legitimate activity, but alongside the more responsible end of that market, we’ve also attracted some plain old spam. It’s not what our service is intended for and we’d like to politely ask those people to go elsewhere.
So a month from now, on 22 February 2010, we will be changing our Trial and Free pricing plans so that you can no longer make pages public. There will be no change for our paying customers. We’d like to say sorry to those of our free account holders who find this feature useful, but we hope that by giving a month’s warning, you have time to make alternative arrangements if necessary. And of course we won’t be deleting anything, you will still be able to access all your pages when logged in.
If you have any questions about this change, send us an email at support@swirrl.com
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Posted by Bill
Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:30:00 GMT
Alongside developing our online database application, we spend time talking to our users and potential users about how they can manage their data. As well as being useful to them (we hope!) this helps us understand the range of problems people are facing and gets us thinking about the kinds of solution that are needed, helping us set the future direction of our software tools.
Because this seems to be a useful activity all round, we’re now putting a bit more emphasis on it and making it more widely known that this is a service we offer. So we’ve put up a new services page on our website to give some more details.
The practical application of semantic web and linked data technologies is at the heart of what we are doing with Swirrl, and that is also the focus of our consulting work. We cover:
- Data publishing strategy
- Selection and design of ontologies
- Conversion of data to RDF
- Use of semantic web technologies for data integration and exchange
This work is not directly related to Swirrl the product: it’s about addressing our clients’ data sharing issues and advising on how the semantic web and linked data can contribute to a solution.
If you’d like to know more, drop us a line at consulting@swirrl.com
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Posted by Bill
Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:25:00 GMT
We’ve been working hard over the last few weeks on designing and implementing our API – well the first version of it at least. Connecting up data on the web is one of our main objectives at Swirrl and so making it easy for software applications to get data in and out of Swirrl is pretty important.
We’re making good progress and we’ll let you know when it’s ready.
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Posted by Ric
Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:55:00 GMT
We released a couple of new features over the weekend:
Item templates
When you’re creating or editing an item in Swirrl, it’s often the case that you’d like to give it some of the same attributes as other items in the same category. When you’re editing an item, we now show you the attributes that have been set on other visible items in the same category, so that you can fill them in if you want to.
You don’t need to set values for all these attributes – it’s just intended as a guide, to avoid you having to keep referring back to the other items in the category to remember what attributes to set. Any attributes that are left blank when you save will just remain unset.
For example, if you have a category for ‘expenses’, for each individual expense you might normally set the date, amount spent, VAT, description, what form the receipt is in, and who is claiming the expense. Now, after the first expense item has been created, you wont need to remember this list: when users who can see your original item edit another expense, these attributes will be presented to them.
Attribute tables
We’ve added a new way to view lists of items in Swirrl (i.e. search results, items tagged with a particular keyword, or items in a category etc.)
By default the results displayed in the way you’re used to: as a list of item names.
However, if you prefer, you can now choose to see a table of the attributes of the items by clicking the link ‘show attributes’. This helps you see, at a glance, more details about each item without having to view them all one by one.
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Posted by Ric
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:35:00 GMT
A few days ago I posted an article about the semantic web on the ThinkAboutTech blog, which I thought readers of SwirrlSpeak might find interesting:
Semantics are important. They always have been and they always will be, because they are fundamental to the process of communication. What’s been changing recently is the means that we use to record and communicate information, especially with the advent of the internet…
(read the rest of the article)
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