iGlued some resources and concepts together

iGlue consists of a semantic knowledge base and some browser (Chrome and Firefox) plugins that enables the user to link together a piece of text on a web page that refers to a concept (person, place, thing etc) and a resource in the knowledge base, and to explore more about the concept where those links have already been made. It is in beta at present and users can annotate web pages to link to existing items in the knowledge base, but eventually they will also be able to add to the knowledge base thereby crowdsourcing some of the linkages in the semantic web. In the illustration above, the I linked the Cordyceps heading to the video resource in the knowledge base.

I signed up yesterday and received an email message with a link to activate my account. Every time I try I get a server overloaded response, but that has not prevented me using the plugins to annotate web pages.

With the ability to add to the semantic knowledge base, this could be a great tool to develop learning resources by:

• creating a web page with basic information on a topic
• link text on the page to a variety of resources in the knowledge base such as video, images, other web pages etc

Via the ‘icecube’ plugin the visitor does not lose their place on the web page. The linked resources can be explored within the icecube that sits over the top of the web page. My only problem with the icecube is that it does not work well on a small screen (1024x600).

I thought about creating a screencast but then I found that there was already a good video on the site that already showed some of the features I was thinking of including. (Youtube embed)