I’ve had some ideas for things and things to do at some point in the future, but I can’t do all of them at the same time and most ideas need more thought (and research). I’ll list them here, not ordered by priority in any case, hopefully to inspire more ideas and spark discussion.
New website design
I’ve been working on a new logo for my blog, but since text (a few letters (my initials) or a few words (my name)) is a big part of it, I need to find letters matching the design I had in mind, or create everything from scratch. Maybe I should start with the rest of the design – colours, layout, name, all of that and more.
Bibliography for my thesis
As a testcase and example for a bibliographic ontology that started as a joke, but which may turn out to be okay, I am building an RDF version of the bibliography of my Master’s thesis. Also, I had had in my mind that putting the thesis in its context of citing papers could serve as a general example for letting sources of science out.
Bibliography for everything
With Discogs.com being (almost like) the reference database of information regarding recorded published music, I have often wondered why there isn’t a clear alternative for books, serials, and other publications with CC0-licence and solely based on user input. So far I have only registered the domain name Bibliogs.info and jotted a few notes on paper.
Catalogue of my books and magazines
Another analogy involving Discogs.com: I have a catalogue of my CDs based on Discogs CD descriptions, but no catalogue of my books and magazines. Not only should it give me an idea of the monetary value of my collection (based on internet sales), but especially for serials it should help determine the value of the content of each thing.
Newspaper as semantic EPUB
My digital subscription to a newspaper entitles me to downloading an EPUB version of each edition. I have read several editions as EPUB on an ereader, but switched to the web version because the layout was better. I have to see whether changes in the layout of the paper version also triggered changes in the EPUB version, but I bet more semantics would still fit and not do harm.
Personal Information Management with a Knowledge Base
Although PIM tools (email clients, calendars, address books and the like) are pretty smart and integrated nowadays, I feel they can be smarter — meaning (much) more personal. The knowledge base is one from the field of Artificial Intelligence; it stores facts and answers questions. Intelligent interfaces to the KB then allows questions like “Find a good day to go to the cinema for a film that I will like” (and an answer would be based, in part, on my appointments, non-listed appointments like “be at the office”, location, interests and films I’ve seen already).
Professional network exploration and building without LinkedIn
Before LinkedIn, there was email, snail mail, business cards and solutions for sharing news, being social professionally and getting introduced to new people. All these things are still here, and in the meantime LinkedIn is mining and selling its users’ data profiles. Do I want to publicly show who is “in my network” and be sold? Are there other ways? Perhaps the PIM KB can help?
Online privacy and personal data security
All my Thunderbird installs are now equipped with GPG plugin, as is Apple Mail and Outlook (built in encryption?). But using it is a different story — my primary email is still Gmail, which I use via the web interface. Encrypted chat should be my default too.
I don’t engage in criminal activities, but being watched all the time does feel strange. Putting signed certificates in the right places is also part of the plan.