|
| Bumblehood portal is powered by BumbleMap software. |
BumbleMap is a software platform for collaborative knowledge management that the Bumblehood portal is being run on. However, just as MediaWiki software is not used only to power Wikipedia, BumbleMap platform is applicable not only to the domain of local guides and businesses you find in Bumblehood, but to other domains as well. The need for organizing information and presenting it in a structured and easily navigable way can be found in any field of human activity. Just think about how well you could build any community-driven Internet site (say, about music, movies, entertainment, fashion, etc) in this way. You could also use BumbleMap to power your company's intranet, or even run your business, just as we do it in Bumblehood.
|
| Bumblehood intranet - using BumbleMap software to run company's intranet. |
The key to Bumblehood's effectiveness in building knowledge about geographical locations and businesses worldwide lies in structuring that knowledge in such a way that the semantic relationship between two information entities is respected. In Bumblehood, the most important relationship is the geographical containment, and due to its importance it is strictly enforced by the platform. In other domains, however, such relationships may be entirely different. For instance, the BumbleMap platform already powers several companies' intranets, where the enforced semantic restrictions impose various business rules and workflows. The Bumblehood development team uses BumbleMap for organizing different artifacts according to Bumblehood's software development process. Nonetheless, you can imagine BumbleMap being applied to any other domain as well.
Under the hood, the BumbleMap platform represents knowledge using the topic maps paradigm. A topic map consists of a set of topics capturing concepts from the knowledge domain and maps them to resources referring to information about concepts. Relationships between concepts are expressed by topic associations which are typed combinations of any number of topics. The strict separation of relationships between topics from their occurrences in resources is the principal strength of the topic maps paradigm. BumbleMap makes the topic maps paradigm transparent to users and enables them to easily apply it to the domain of their choice. BumbleMap also provides powerful and clear tree-based visualization of the topic map with a “smart” context menu adhering to typing of topics, associations and occurrences. We firmly believe that such tree organization significantly improves usability of the platform, and with Bumblehood portal we are determined to prove that it is indeed possible to build a “killer” semantic web application based on such grounds.
Needless to say, the BumbleMap platform is designed in a modular way, and many of its elements are fully configurable and customizable. Examples of such generic elements are the aforementioned tree context menu, templates and gadgets. At the moment, Bumblehood provides community with a predefined set of templates and gadgets that can be put on a page. However, new templates and gadgets can easily be created within the platform. In the future, an API or a domain specific language for developing templates and gadgets will be opened so that the community will be able to develop new ones themselves. Opening our software for customization is an ongoing process by which we aim to provide a fully generic platform that non-developers will be able to utilize and adapt according to their needs. Until this happens, should you be interested in a customized version of the Bumblehood platform, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are sure that we will be able to provide you with a solution which meets all your demands.
Read more:
