Flow *

I've been meaning to check out APML for a while now and finally had a look around the current draft. Its maybe a little off the topic of Pipelines and Flow but you can certainly see how a meme-engine could be used like a rules/filtering engine. The diagram which Ashley drawed out shows a pipeline type flow with the rules-engine (in this case Touchstone) in the middle.

So where does APML fit in all this? Well its allows you to define the rules and share them. APML its self is described as...

APML is an XML file that contains an outline of Implicit and Explicit interests and Sources Rankings by Device and Profile

At its crux you have Usages and Uses which are tied to a profile and device via IDs. Inside of the Use there are.

• Implicit Concepts - concepts that are auto-calculated for the user by an algorithm
• Explicit Concepts - concepts provided manually by the user
• Source Rankings - levels of trust the user assigns to their sources of information

I'll post or link to a example (but the PDF seems to be made using some crazy binary scheme, so I can't even copy the text out directly). In the PDF the only implementation is Touchstone but there is some suggestion that Amazon/Google/Digg, etc could do this for all there customers if they liked.

As a defination format its ok but is too tied to Touchstone with simple things like the ranking is on a scale of -5 to +5 rather that a percentage or more straight forward number (0 - 1000 for example).
Phrase attribute will suffer when your using regular expressions or more advance searches, at the moment the spec relies on mainly plain text searches.
The Sources are defined everytime there is a new profile which sucks if you have 400 sources like myself. Ideally it would link to OPML or use some Xinclude type system to only refer to the correct source and apply a rank.
I also don't really like the uppercase on each element and attribute but thats just me being picky. As mentioned in the PDF, it would be great to see how it slots in with Attention XML , OPML and I would add FOAF. See I was thinking some of this could be very useful in a FOAF file.

Generally its still in draft form and I look forward to being able to get the implicit concepts out of touchstone and into another system if needed but I don't think anyone else is anywhere near implementing such a system. And if they are, they wouldn't let anyone take the rules out. Good work once again Touchstone guys, just needs more work again.

Technorati Tags: apml, attention xml, draft, explicit, foaf, implicit, meme-engine, opml, pdf, rank, ranking, source, rules, touchstone