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SIMILE is a joint project conducted by the MIT Libraries and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.

SIMILE will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemata and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful “views” to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.

To guide the SIMILE effort we will focus on well-defined, real-world use cases in the libraries domain. Since parallel work is underway to deploy DSpace at a number of leading research libraries, we hope that such an approach will lead to a powerful deployment channel through which the utility and readiness of semantic web tools and techniques can be compellingly demonstrated in a visible and global community.

The SIMILE Project and its members are fully committed to the open source principles of software distribution and open development and for this reason, it releases the created intellectual property (both software and reports) under a BSD-style license. The SIMILE Project team members gladly welcome community efforts and would particularly like to recognize SIMILE’s contributors.

Check out some of the cool projects (including Exhibit and Timeline)

http://simile.mit.edu/

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. Below is a live example that you can play with. Pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally.

Timeline website

Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.

It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.

Exhibit website