Augmented Reality Apps May Provide New Motivation for Publishing Linked Data

Recently there have been several articles on location/Augmented-Reality based applications such as those referenced below:

The Wall Has Fallen: 3 Augmented Reality Apps Now Live in iPhone App Store

Mobile phones get cyborg vision

Mobilizy Previews Augmented Reality GPS Navigation App

RobotVision: A Bing-powered iPhone Augmented Reality Browser

Apple Developing Location-Based Home Screen for the iPhone?

and others like:

Augmented reality: iPhone 3G S killer app?

wherein one finds the following enticing quote from CNET author Scott Stein, about real-time scanning for data:

“If augmented-reality navigation apps can progress at the same feverish development pace as the rest of the App Store, the new iPhone could soon be capable of location-based feats that approach tricorder capabilities, scanning the environment in real-time for data“

Though popular location-based apps have already been demonstrating the potential of data on the web, reference to the “tricorder”, of course, invokes sci-fi style visions.  Perhaps this bit of  futuristic fantasy materializing so rapidly before us will help to make clearer the  transformative potential of Linked-Data/Web-of-Data/Data-Web.

Click on the image above to see it in action, then:

• Move the slider on the right to resize
• Drag from anywhere on the circles to relocate
• Click on any label to redraw
• View Source to see JSON expression of data being visualized

This implementation and enhancement of JIT was written by Chris Beer and was demonstrated with a different dataset at Code4Lib this year.

The dataset being demonstrated here is a slight extension of the one referenced in the Cytoscope post of 2009.04.24.

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

* Promote international and intercultural understanding;
* Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
* Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
* Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.

http://ratherinsane.com/~chris/c4l09/index2.php

Really neat implementation and demo of how to mess with rdf data.

Looks like it uses:  http://blog.thejit.org/javascript-information-visualization-toolkit-jit/

It was put together by Christopher Beer, http://twitter.com/_cb_