October 21, 2007

RSS Content Analysis, Tag Clouds and OpenLearn Navigation

Last week, I came across a service - Jiglu - that claimed to "automatically create intelligent tags and links for your web content". One of the things I've been exploring lately is the potential for constructing thematic bundles of OpenLearn course units - as more and more units are added to the current OpenLearn topics, their usefulness as containers that support discovery through browsing becomes debatable...

So the Jiglu service looked interesting this respect; unfortunately, it seems that you need to add a Javascript snippet to the pages you want to analyse, which I don't have access to on OpenLearn (I didn't check this - maybe the javascript is just required for presentaion and you can find a API URL in the code?)

However, ZoomClouds - the tag cloud service I use on OUseful Info - only requires an RSS feed URL in order for you to benefit from it's content analysis and term extraction service, so I dutifully set up a demo.

Here, for example, is a cloud generated from the unit feed from M248_1 Exploring data: graphs and numerical summaries (see demo tag cloud).

As far as I know, ZoomClouds doesn't offer an API for creating new ZoomClouds, although the ZoomCLouds APIdoes publish an XML feed containing the tags extracted from a feed, so generating a ZoomCloud for each of the dozens and dozens of OpenLearn Units that are now available would be tedious, to say the least!

What might be more interesting could be to generate a single, spliced feed of several OpenLearn units - maybe even all the units in an OpenLearn topic area, or at least all the descriptions of courses in a topic area - and generate a navigational tag cloud that links into the course descriptions, rather than the sections within an individual course.

Ahh - what the heck - let's see how that might look. Let's take the feed of unit descriptions for the OpenLearn Science and Nature topic, for example:


See demo tag cloud.

As OpenLearn provides access to more and more units, supporting discovery of relevant content is going to become more and more of an issue. The use of ZoomClouds shows one possible approach to automating the generation of navigational widgets on the basis of content analysis, In a later post, I'll write up a tag based approach I've been exploring in the context of a Digg-like interface to OpenLearn - OpenLearnigg.

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Posted by ajh59 at October 21, 2007 12:12 AM
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