Valentin will be doing a session on multi-lingual blogging.

We’ll also be at the following events in the Berlin web week:

• Web 2.0 Expo (Exhibition floor only)
• PitchParty
• LateCrunch

Drop us a line if you’d like to meet and talk about recommendations and what they can do for your site!

The idea is this:  You have a site that has information about music, or movies or airplanes or whatever, and you’d like to add links to related encyclopedia to your page with just a couple lines of customization.

To make that work as one would expect we also added fuzzy search.  That’s important because, for instance, the article for “Madonna” in Wikipedia is titled, “Madonna (entertainer)”.  So, now with our fuzzy searching you can search for the closest hit to a term with a specific tag, in this case “Madonna” tagged as “musician”.

The list of available tags is here.

The new AJAX widget is trivial to use.  Here’s what it looks like.  If you click it’ll take you to a page that you can use to copy-paste from.

You can get that on your page by adding two lines to you page / template:

<script src=”http://pedia.directededge.com/RelatedArticlesWidget.js” type=”text/JAVASCRIPT”></script>

<div class=”RelatedArticles” title=”Music Related to James Brown” fuzzy=”James Brown” fuzzytag=”musician” tags=”musician”></div>

All items that are returned use the “RelatedArticles” class, so that you can style them in your stylesheet as you see fit.  These are the supported attributes (only title or fuzzy are required):

• topic:  A specific (exact) wikipedia article name.
• fuzzy:  Find the nearest article name.
• fuzzytag: modifies the fuzzy search so that it looks for an item with that tag.  Note:  this does not affect the related articles, for that use the following attribute.
• tags: The tags for the returned articles. i.e. Using a fuzzytag for James Brown will specify that the main article should be a musician named James Brown, but specifying musician for tags will ensure that all of the returned results are also musicians.
• title: The title to be used for the list.  This defaults to Related Encyclopedia Articles.
• prefix: The prefix to be used for the links.  This defaults to http://pedia.directededge.com/article/ Here you could also specify http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ to link to the English wikipedia.

If you decide to link to Wikipedia or somewhere else using the last tag, we’d request that you at least give us a mention in your company / project’s blog somewhere.

Enjoy and feel free to drop us questions or comments!

If you’ve got any questions about the API or things that you’d like to do with it that don’t seem to be supported at the moment, we’d like to hear from you!

Directed Edge will be there.  Will you?

• “Business & Beer”, August 27
• Open Coffee Club, August 28
• Bratwurst on Rails, September 1
• RailsConf Europe, September 2-4

Drop us a line if you’ll be there as well and we can arrange a meeting!

Per the comments on that page, we will start rolling out our Wikipedia demo in other languages probably about a week from now.

One of the open questions for us as we pushed out the first bits of our web-services API  last week was, “Can we get this content to show up in Wikipedia proper?”

Last night after an extended hacking session where I tried a number of strategies for doing DOM scripting to pull in external content (and some misadventures in trying to do cross-site XMLHttpRequests) I managed to come up with a simple way of pulling in content from our web service via JSONP, and added support for JSON output to our web service along the way.  For Wikipedians that are logged in, it only requires adding one line to your monobook.js file and I’ve created a short how-to here.  The source code, for interested hackers is here.

Here’s what it looks like:

When we launched our demo a few people didn’t seem to get quite what it does that our engine is doing — we’re not just analyzing the current page and pulling in a few important links; we’re jumping out a few levels in the link structure and analyzing and ranking usually several thousand links in the neighborhood of the target page.  Often those pages are linked from the target page, but that’s hardly a surprise.  I come from a background of doing research in web-like search, so it’s no coincidence that our approach to finding related pages takes some hints from PageRank and other link-based approaches to sorting out the web.

We’d invite people to try this out and of course to keep playing with our mashup; we’ve gotten so used to having related pages that it’s hard to go back to the vanilla Wikipedia — having the related pages there makes it really easy to sort out things like, “What are the important related topics?” or “Well, I know about X, what are the main alternatives?”  And so on.  We’ve got some other exciting stuff up our collective sleeves that we’ll be rolling out in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

You can get a list of supported tags here:

http://pedia.directededge.com/api/v1/tags/

That currently returns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<directededge version="0.1">
  <tag>actor</tag>
  <tag>author</tag>
  <tag>book</tag>
  <tag>company</tag>
  <tag>film</tag>
  <tag>musician</tag>
</directededge>

You can then get results from article queries based on a tag, using something like this:

http://pedia.directededge.com/api/v1/article/KDE/tags/company/

Which returns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<directededge version="0.1">
  <item id="KDE">
    <link>Trolltech</link>
    <link>Novell</link>
    <link>Hewlett-Packard Company</link>
    <link>Nokia</link>
    <link>World Wide Web Consortium</link>
    <link>Mandriva</link>
    <link>Canonical Ltd.</link>
    <link>Sirius Satellite Radio</link>
  </item>
</directededge>

You can query any article for any tag (unlike in the web interface).  Right now the results for “off topic” tags tend to be hit-or-miss.  One of the other big items on our to-do list is improving tagged results in our engine.

I’m posting incremental updates like this in the hopes that if you’re planning on using our API in a mashup that you’ll let us know what you like and don’t like before we freeze v1.

We’ve also decided on a couple of limitations for the open API that aren’t true for our commercial API (running either on customer data sets or open data sets):

• You’re limited to 10 results.
• You can only filter on one tag at a time, meaning, you can’t get ranked results for movies and music simultaneously.

We think those are pretty reasonable and still give users a fair bit of room to play for free.  If you’re interested in using our commercial API, drop us a line!  We’ve also just created an announcement list where we’ll notify folks that are signed up of important details.  You can sign up for that here.

You can now hit something like:

http://pedia.directededge.com/api/v1/article/KDE

And get back:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<directededge version="0.1">
  <item id="KDE">
    <link>GNOME</link>
    <link>Unix-like</link>
    <link>Desktop environment</link>
    <link>Konqueror</link>
    <link>Qt (toolkit)</link>
    <link>KDE 4</link>
    <link>GNU Lesser General Public License</link>
    <link>X Window System</link>
    <link>KPart</link>
    <link>Widget toolkit</link>
  </item>
</directededge>

I’ll be adding support for JSON output and filtering based on tags in the next few days.  Once I’ve got a set of features there that I consider feature complete I’ll freeze the “v1″ so that people can create mashups based on that and be sure that the API will remain stable.

This does do capitalization correction, but does not do redirect detection.  I’m debating if I want to do that by default or use another REST path since it requires another couple DB queries and is as such a little slower.