date first and last

The selfengine UI is taking shape, at the heart screen is a live data section.  Given the context set, live data will be visualized.  Right now the visualization is a chart, one for the past and one a prediction for the future.  Charts only come to life with data and the world records for each swimming stroke are going to be the starting point and then anyone using the selfengine can add their own personal data.

Needs done:

Add swimming strokes, distances and times

Select with context is live

Visualised records on past chart

Do some datamining/statistics to make future predictions. (should be fun)

 

Self engine = suggestions

The code has not been flying so fast this year on the LL OS project as I focus to apply it to the world of sport via the Open Sport Project.  This is providing a niche focus with which to apply the lifestylelinking ideas.  LifestyleLinking does not mean much to most folks straight off the bat so the best two world description would be to call the Lifestylinking Open Source Project as a Self Engine.

And a Self Engine produce suggestions.   Much like a search engine provide results.  I ve written a little more on the term on my blog.

The three biggest trend converging around this market are the quantified self movement, big data and the webs flipping back into decentralisation mode after its silo building phase again.

The Self Engine has a UI that allows the individual to manage their attention and context of their life, aggregation of data, hopefully the open source nature of the project will allow a data plug marketplace of tools both to include different data source and ‘data mining’ techniques, all this done in real time.

Step 1 BDD start to explain

The LifestyleLinking Open Source Project has been ‘live’ for 4 years now, initially years of experimentation to get an application to perform ‘lifestylelinking’.  That is to allow an individual datamine themselves and to connect them with the best personalized content given their view of the world(universe).  How do these words translate into building a User Interface?

Good question. To explore this I have setup a page on Moqups, the LifestyleLinking m0qup. The starting concepts.  Three blocks + Footer.

Identity Top block:
The expression of Identity.  This gives the LL application a life-line into the digital assets that make up an individual.  Hopefully, the Personal Data Locker / Service providers will have empowered all individuals with access to their own data.

LifestyleLinking Ingredients Display:
Given the identity information this needs to be visualised so that it can be use to construct the intention for the individual.  Initially this will be a tagcloud / list of words extracted from their historical attention/identity.

LifestyleFlow:
With an intention selected (dragged into the LLflow area is the current UI model being pursued),  ‘LifestyleLinking’ will be performed, this creates a social network between the individual and all other content based upon what they have authored in the past, given the current intention context, information will be displayed.  Initially, blog posts.

Footer:
A link to the LL open source project and a ‘clone ‘me’ ‘ link.  A reminder that if the individual wishes then new applications can be spawned from this LL instance i.e. initially a link to github repository for developers to install their own LL application and in the future hosted online services complete with data flow.

Behaviour driven development – LifestyleLinking

I was pointed to this video from ScotlandJS on Behaviour driven development and test driven development.  I was particularly interested in the javascript perspective.   Knowing where to start and which set of tools to support BSS endeavours is my current task at hand.

service architecture

Over the last year or so I rewrote the lifestylelinking code in OOP PHP.  This involved setting up object patterns, for me learning about pattern and then deploying those I sough fit.  However, at the end of this process I felt the code was still to rigid for a data driven application.  I have been following node.js for a while and have been encourage by some fellow coders that it well suited to this project.  I agree with that conclusion.  Not sure exactly how the node.js code will pan out but the potential it brings to some deep core problems should mean months of fun coding ahead.

Continuous Integration & Unit Testing

The goal over the next 2 month is to get the code into a continuous integration and unit test framework.  Probably Jenkins and PHPunit test.  In the mean time those keen enough to download the code from GITHUB then please contact me and I will be more than happy to hand old you through the set up of the code.

datamine me + share

The last post mentioned StrataConf.com 2011, we are now in 2012 and I am attending the event in Santa Clara, California.  This is giving the opportunity to share the LifestyleLinking project and its ideas with the data science community.  The way I have been describing the project is that is allows an individual to ‘data mine themselves and share the answers’.  For example data mine your blog posts against Wikipedia definitions, but what definitions there is a lot to select from?  The idea is to crowd source those from existing word clouds an individual has e.g.   delicious social book marking list of words and match those to Wikipedia definitions.  The + share part would them involves those individuals that want to share and thus gain a network effect by including the data mining ‘me’ results from other blogs giving the potential to reach more relevant data on topics of interest to the individual.

Strata Conference winner like LifestyleLinking

If I could only attend one conference in 2011 it would have been the Strata Conference in San Francisco last week. Data, the recent entitling of the Data Scientist, big data and data in the cloud all major themes that I follow.  But small data and having it networked is the vision we hold at the LifestyleLinking project so I was delighted to read on the ReadWriteWeb blog that Singly had won the startup competition running during the conference.

Singly is the commercial venture behind the open source projects of Jeremie Miller, Locker Project and the TeleHash PeertoPeer JSON data exchanging. The projects are people centric and start by giving individuals the ability to collect their own data on the web, stage two allow it to be shared or networked together for those that wish to and lastly allow developers the ability to offer apps to help individuals use their data to improve peoples lives, from restaurants to figuring out how to prevent cancer, diabetes and other heath matters.  It is a vision we adhere to too.   Most of the energy in the LL project started out on figuring out how individual data is connected, but this has meant addressing most of the infrastructure questions of building an application to allow individuals to collect their own data and to create a network, in our case a primitive RDF – Dpedia connection of the people apps. in the network.  With the hope of more developer resources in the ecosystem via these open source projects then hopefully we can spend more time on understanding the data connections (which only get about 20% of the energy right now) and listening to individual needs in permissioning data access, gathering and sharing through a user interface that is useful to people in their daily lives.

More thoughts on this topic from O’Reilly blog and the UgoTrade Blog.

Lifestreaming 1-3 years before its back in vogue

The best blog on Lifestreaming that I know is written by Mark Krynsky.  In this blog post he summaries an interview he recorded with David Galernter, the person regarded as the creator of  lifestreaming.  At the end of the post Mark gives his take on things going forward and even make a rare prediction:

“With regards to Lifelogging I am seeing a multitude of dedicated devices and smartphone apps that track all sorts of personal data around exercise, sleep, weight, health, etc. As these devices become better, cheaper, and the data collected starts providing large benefits to improving our lives, we will see adoption of them start to surge. I think these two areas show not only the ways that Lifestreaming could recapture the interest of users, but also provide good monetization options for startups. I don’t often make predictions but I see this starting to happen between the next 1-3 years.”

I think his analysis is spot on but the development and delivery of such services to make his predictions true are being built today and tomorrow with increasing intelligence, sharing and hopefully with growing adoption and  usage.

Lifestyle classifying – everything

There is an informative blog post on O’Reilly today titled, Need faster machine learning? Take a set-oriented approach. In summary it’s about bringing processing efficiency to a ‘machine learning’ algorithm to categorise job vacancies in the field of Electric Medical Records.  Even for this ‘small’ categorisation set the calculations are vast.  The LifestlyeLinking project is using this approach to classify lifestyles instead of jobs.  While the processes read similar the technology applied and categorisation seeding used start from different places.  The LL project has chosen Wikipedia to seed lifestyle definitions and an application of wisdom of the crowd mathematics is used instead of a bayes classifier.  Regards of these differences, the goals are the same, to give individuals the best information to live their lives by or to find the right job.

As for the question of scaling, smarts in database and managing data is where this post says ‘Set Oriented’ approach has applied dramatic improves in processing times.  The LL project has concluded (thus far) to thinking away from this centralized data process to a framework of decentralized peer-to-peer processing and then find away to aggregate (share) the data demanded for each peers needs.  We are yet to put this into practice but from our experience to date, scaling in the cloud breaks down and ‘small’ levels of categorisation, let alone all the information that makes up life.