SwirrlSpeak

Swirrl and Linked Data

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:07:00 +0000

Swirrl is about understanding your data and doing more with it. One thing you are likely to want to do is to combine data held in Swirrl with data held in other systems. So one of the features we’ve been working on is how to get data out of Swirrl in useful ways.

Behind the scenes Swirrl stores data as RDF. This is a good way to allow users to flexibly create data models to allow data to be combined together in interesting ways. We’ve recently released the ability to export a data set as an RDF file, and also implemented the Linked Data approach to allow the data held in Swirrl to be browsed using external software.

The principles of the Linked Data approach are described in this article by Tim Berners-Lee. It’s about making data linkable and browseable in a web environment. This has always been a central aspect of our idea for how Swirrl works and we’ve been able to do this from the start inside the Swirrl application – but by adding Linked Data support, we’re taking the first steps to connecting data in Swirrl to the rest of the world.

Because you can control access within Swirrl on a data set by data set basis, you can use it as a Linked Data publishing tool and make the data open, or if you want to keep your data private to your group, you can do that too.

Better support for European languages

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:26:00 +0000

Our recent release now allows you to use a wider range of characters in the names of your pages and data sets (and also for the names of things and their properties inside data sets).

We’ve always allowed any Unicode character in the content of a page, but now you can also use characters with various accents (from the extended-ASCII range) in the titles, as well as apostrophes and quote marks. Now our Spanish-, German-, French-, Swedish- and Dutch-speaking users (and others) can spell words correctly in their page names.

The accented characters are converted to similar or ‘equivalent’ ASCII characters for use in the URL associated with the item.

It’s a small change but we hope you like it.

Swirrl Chat

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:19:00 +0000

If you want to talk to one of us about Swirrl, please drop by our chat room. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Swirrl Team members will normally be available for chat during UK working hours, but we might be around at other times too. If we’re not there, you can chat amongst yourselves!

File Sharing Feature Released

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:42:00 +0000

Our recent release includes the new File Sharing feature.

You can now upload files into your Swirrl wiki. These could be images to embed in a wiki page, documents, presentations or any other files related to your work. Files in Swirrl are assigned permissions, so you can easily decide who to share them with.

There’s now an additional section on the New page to allow you to upload files into your wiki, and you can see files in your wiki visible to you by clicking on the ‘uploaded files’ link on your wiki’s search page. This list provides all the important details about each file, including the url to access it, its description and who uploaded it at what time. Updating of permissions is available by following the ‘details’ link. For more details see the tour.

File Sharing is available on all plans, with 10MB of storage up for grabs for free and more generous allocation available on the paying plans.

New Features: File Sharing and RDF Export

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:34:00 +0000

Yesterday, we deployed a new version of Swirrl.

This release contains several new features including the ability to upload files into Swirrl wikis, and to export Data Sets as RDF. We’ve also made some improvements to the way we generate urls for items.

We’ll post a few articles on this blog shortly, with more details on each of these new features.

Public sharing now free

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:09:00 +0100

Following some constructive criticism about the style of Swirrl’s user interface, we put our designer hats on and tweaked things a little.

Check out the new public site, and log in to see the changes to the actual application. Please let us know what you think. We think that the new design is clearer and less cluttered.

We’ve also made public sharing of pages and data sets available on the free plan. Just select ‘public’ from the view-permission menu (in the right-hand sidebar), press ‘Update’ and that item will be visible to the world. You can then send the url of that webpage to your friends or colleagues so they can view your item without having to join your wiki.

New 'export' features released

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:02:00 +0100

One of the benefits of Swirrl is that it provides a secure and centralised repository for all of your data, and tools to edit and analyse it. However, sometimes we realise you want to work with your data in another software package, or just keep an extra copy of it.

So we’ve recently added the ability to export your data (both data sets and normal wiki pages).

You can export data sets as a csv file, so they can be opened in a spreadsheet application, or imported into another system. You can also export your wiki pages as html, so that they can be viewed off-line (if you know you won’t have internet connectivity for some reason). Exporting data sets as RDF is coming soon.

Obviously we hope you’ll find Swirrl useful and stick with it. But you can always export your data again if it doesn’t work out.

Swirrl on ReadWriteWeb

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:05:00 +0100

Richard McManus of ReadWriteWeb was kind enough to give Swirrl a try and write up his first impressions. His article gives a good overview of Swirrl and what we are trying to achieve.

He has a few criticisms to make: “In our tests, it was difficult to use Swirrl.” Obviously, we’re doing our best to make the system as intuitive to use as possible, but this is very valuable feedback for us. The data sets features of Swirrl are something new – and so it may be difficult for new users to know where to start. We hope that a bit of perseverance will pay off and that once people get used to it, they’ll find it a useful way to work.

But we realise that helping users get over that “OK, I’ve signed up, what do I do now?” moment is crucial. We’‘ll keep tweaking our design to try to make it easier and more natural for people to work with.

We’re hoping that our rapidly growing user base will give us some feedback on what works for them and what doesn’t. So if you have been giving Swirrl a try, please do drop us a line at hello@swirrl.com, leave a comment on the blog, or post your thoughts on our new forum.

One week on

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:57:00 +0100

So, the public site has been up and running for a week. What have we got to report?

Well, today we passed the 100-wikis mark, and apart from a couple of minor teething problems (which we’ve now sorted out) everything is running smoothly.

Follow Swirrl on Twitter:

We’ve also opened up a couple of new channels for communication:

Forums, where you can discuss Swirrl, ask questions, and give feedback. They are open to anyone who is interested in Swirrl: our users, people deciding if Swirrl is for them, or just people who want to know what it is all about. We look forward to hearing from you.

And a Twitter account. We will tweet with any status announcements or news regarding Swirrl.

Swirrl is live!

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:09:00 +0100

We are pleased to announce that Swirrl is now live!

Sign up (free) and give it a try – we’d love to hear your comments and suggestions. We’ve also updated the tour pages if you want an overview of how it works.

We have a long list of new features planned, so look out for updates over the coming weeks and months.