Blogging Fogbeam: Episode 3: A Quoddy Interlude


Hello Gentle Reader, let's step aside from our (more or less) chronological review of Fogbeam Labs events, and skip to the present for a moment... as you may know, we are working to become recognized as The Next Great Open Source Company; or - as we sometimes word it- "The Red Hat of Information Retrieval, Knowledge Management, Business Intelligence and Analytics."


To that end, we have three projects under active development. In keeping with our focus on shedding light on otherwise inscrutable things, and our commitment to helping you "cut through the information fog," all of our projects are named after famous light-houses. This is a constant reminder to us, to focus on illuminating the insights and knowledge that you need to work more productively and efficiently.


For those of you who aren't already familiar, the three projects under development at the moment are Heceta, Neddick and Quoddy. Quoddy is the primary subject of this blog post.


We are putting a lot of energy into ways to use "social" information for actual productive uses. To that end, Quoddy is our social-networking component. You could think of it as "Facebook for the Enterprise" but that is an imperfect analogy... Quoddy is an information and knowledge sharing tool for real-world use... not a way to send banal updates about silly games to everyone you know. There's no Farmville or Pirates Vs. Ninjas here.


In addition to the well-known, Facebook or Twitter like "friending" or "following" that most of us are familiar with, Quoddy will allow users to make semantic assertions about the relationship between individuals, and to make meaningful semantic assertions about the members of those relationships. This rich semantic information will in turn be used by Quoddy, Neddick and Heceta to help users locate, filter, route and share information.


Quoddy is still in a fairly nascent state, but a substantial amount of the basic functionality is started to round into shape. Given the progress we've made in the past few weeks, now seemed like a good time to post some screenshots. To that end, I've posted a number of screenshots to Google+. To check out the images, see:

https://plus.google.com/u/1/114301088526097505896/posts/3NVEkHxRVUY



While you're checking those out, we'll be cranking away on more features... and we'll be back soon with more of the Fogbeam Blog. Until next time, Fans of Fogbeam...