21 Jan 2009, 11:21am
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  • oidviz

    What we do here in the Okkam project, is cre­at­ing an global infra­struc­ture, allow­ing to give an unique name to any­thing. We called it ENS (Entity Name Sys­tem), inspired by the DNS (Domain Name Sys­tem). Why? Because hav­ing every­thing named and all occur­rences in a doc­u­ment anno­tated with this name makes data inte­gra­tion as easy as pie. But names in a com­puter sci­ence envi­ron­ment are URIs and those are not human-readable by default. For exam­ple http://www.okkam.org/entity/ok923bf64b-3edf-4d0a-baf8-592db9f55689 is my name! :) — for sure no one is able nor will­ing to mem­o­rize this. As a first approach to this, I cre­ated a lit­tle PHP script, that can pro­duce an image rep­re­sent­ing those names, or ENS iden­ti­fiers or Okkam IDs (in short OID)  as we call them. This result­ing image should be much eas­ier to be remem­bered an recognized.

    representation for http://www.okkam.org/entity/ok923bf64b-3edf-4d0a-baf8-592db9f55689, that is me
    representation for http://www.okkam.org/entity/ok42fe5511-c177-435a-8cf7-18b6a881d8b7, a friend and colleague of mine

    The upper one rep­re­sents me and the one below Ste­fano Bor­toli, a friend and col­league of mine. Sev­eral dimen­sions have been used, like color, size, posi­tion and line-width. As a next step, besides improv­ing cre­ation speed, pat­terns and shapes could be intro­duced and even motion by exchang­ing the PNG image either with an old-fashioned ani­mated GIF or a Flash ani­ma­tion. Inte­gra­tion is kept as sim­ple as it can be, e.g. by sim­ply insert­ing <img src=“http://okkam.dit.unitn.it/oidviz/?oid=[put your ID here]”/> into your XHTML page. The PHP script returns a bit stream, as if you would load an exist­ing image directly from a server but instead it is cre­ated on-the-fly.