Womcat Bookmarks Overview

Note: this project is currently in a state of abandonment, and is not being actively developed. Most of what it originally tried to achieve can now be found in social bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us. However it may be of interest to anyone wishing to understand the concepts behind the MACAW local web application framework and the TimelessMeaning schema evolution framework.

Future plans to develop the project may include splitting the application into separate components for feed-reading, social bookmarking and "weak" subscriptions. Also I might rewrite it all (including the supporting frameworks) in Python, as it seems to be a whole lot easier to write code in Python compared to Java, especially for a single-user applications, where performance is not so much of an issue.

Womcat Concept

WOMCAT is an acronym that stands for Word Of Mouth Concept: Automating Transitivity.

A description of the original concept for WOMCAT can be found at Miski: A White Paper.

Womcat is a concept that underlies several possible applications.

To find interesting or relevant information, we go to sources of information that we trust to be interesting or relevant.

Information technology can be used to connect consumers of information with "trusted" sources, and then to propagate information through multiple connections.

Then a short history:

Miski got renamed to Womcat.

RSS became popular as a syndication format. After evolving from an application specific XML format to an application specific annotated HTML format, the Womcat Bookmarks file format has now settled on a slightly extended version RSS as the base format, with an accompanying HTML file being generated at the same time as the RSS file. (Note that RSS 2.0 explicitly allows for and encourages experimental extensions.)

So how does Womcat differ from other RSS software?

Womcat Bookmarks are intended to point to other Womcat Bookmarks. Womcat allows for 2 types of RSS items: recommendations and referrals. A recommendation is an RSS item that points to an ordinary web page. A referral is an RSS item that points to another RSS file (which may or may not be generated by Womcat Bookmarks). An XML extension element http://www.womcat.org/:type is used to distinguish between these two possibilities.

Womcat Bookmarks is subject-oriented. RSS puts subjects in the <category> element separated by forward slashes. Womcat Bookmarks requires that every recommendation be contained in a subject. Subjects can also be contained in each other. So if subject Algebra is contained in subject Mathematics, then the category will be Mathematics/Algebra.

Although Womcat Bookmarks subjects for one user form a hierarchy, it cannot be expected that different users will have equivalent or even consistent hierarchies. The most that can be hoped for is that different users might use the same titles for individual subjects. Thus Programming Languages/C is not a very good hierarchy, because "C" by itself is potentially ambiguous. Better is Programming Languages/C Programming Language. In effect subjects are globally considered to live in a flat namespace, and their titles should be unambiguous in a global context without any dependence on position in a user's hierarchy. The end result is to facilitate merging of Womcat Bookmarks (i.e. RSS data) from different users such that they can be usefully browsed by subject.

Womcat Bookmarks are considered to be an accumulating collection of bookmarks, not a transient collection of news items, with items only being deleted if they cease to be relevant (or cease to exist). This is problematic when Womcat is used to read RSS files that may or may not be accumulative or transient in intent. I propose to add an extension element to deal with this, along the lines of specifying a period that the file covers, and optionally another link to a different RSS file that covers that period, e.g. "1 month" for a file that only contains links added up to a month ago, "forever" for a file that contains all current bookmarks. This will also be useful as a way for RSS readers not to have to re-read an accumulated bookmarks file that has grown very large.

Todo: A future version of the application will allow integration with normal browser bookmarks. For example a user might specify a sub-tree of their browser bookmarks to be automatically mapped to their Womcat bookmarks. Within that specified sub-tree, they would have to use self-contained subject names.