AccessiblePlanet
From FOAF
first a garden, then a city, then the planet
This is a Web notebook for work on an Accessible Planet demo, based around the Talking Signs installation at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Fransisco.
The first phase will be for a blind pedestrian to wayfind within the park and to access the Web's properly accessible transit schedules with a few exemplary conveniences/facilities like public buildings, restaurants and whatever... The idea is that by starting with a demonstration of an accessible park, it will become clear what will follow: Accessible City, Accessible Nation, Accessible Planet.
Before the summer is out there will very likely be more than 60 Talking Signs installed in San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens. Each of the transmitters will broadcast an analog message of some kind in the vein of traditional signage that will be available to someone with a receiver. Mostly these will be the same messages as the ones on printed signs.
The transmitters will also be broadcasting a unique-to-each digital number, specifically associated with that (and only that) sign.
The project is to take that number "out of the air" and pipe it into a portable computer which will take the decoded number and do stuff with it in connection with the World Wide Web. The "stuff" that gets done will become increasingly elaborate in ways that will permit coupling the user's system with information of unprecedented elaboration/complexity/usefulness.
Nearby in the Web: SpaceNamespace, ESW:GeoInfo, William's overview page, Libby's notes from SWAD/ER meeting on image annotation, Pointlink, photos from danbri's visit to Boston museum of science talking signs installation.
Contents |
[edit] Yerba Buena Gardens: project overview
Note: these notes merged from various offline email exchanges; mostly these are taken verbatim from William's descriptions of the project.
Once one's location is established it is a fairly simple matter to be presented with any sort of information that is chosen, e.g. "how do I get to the bus stop to get a bus to a certain address", "where can I eat near here", "are any of my colleagues at the conference in the Moscone Center beneath the Gardens", "who's giving a concert tonight in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium", or "call me a taxi" you're a taxi!
'If one is able to just: have a guided tour of the Gardens (how to get from the loo to the waterfall), directions to the bus stop that will get you back to Smith-Kettlewell ("turn right until you hear 'memorial obelisk' and walk towards it until you can locate '3rd st. exit', head towards..."), same for nearby restaurants of the kind the user has picked, the schedule for the day's events at whatever's happening in Moscone Center, then we will have a microcosmic demo/proof/testbed for the actual (ta-da!) Semantic Web.' -- William Loughborough, Sun 02 June 2002
'First job is to orient/navigate about the Gardens, thence to facilities within followed by directions to (for starters) the MUNI transit system.' W.L., Mon 27 May 2002.
'The real question is whether we can make a useful human interface for a
blind guy to know how to get from Yerba Buena Gardens' waterfall to
Smith-Kettlewell's building at 2318 Fillmore Street. I can get the info
from the Web by dealing with a not-too-intimidating interface. We must make
it easy to use and output via speech. Peek at
http://www.transitinfo.org/cgi-bin/taketransit
and go from "Yerba Buena Gardens" (or "Coit Tower" or "Fisherman's Wharf"
or...) to 2318 Fillmore Street.' --W.L., Tue, 21 May 2002
'We need to include geographical (voice mapping) parameters for going anywhere from the Park, as well as within it. We need guides to all sorts of conveniences/facilities/events. We need useful travel tools ("call me a taxi"/"book me a reservation"). We need library/museum-like cataloging/indexing of the themes of the Park. We need schedules for anything from the Moscone Convention Center and Bill Graham Auditorium to the trains/buses/airlines. All spoken through a simple Talking Signs receiver.' -- WL, Mon, 06 May 2002
[edit] first three phases
-- William Loughborough, Mon, 20 May 2002
Phase 1: A blind pedestrian carrying a device up to the size of a laptop (preferably about like a PDA) onto which a Talking Signs Receiver (which has been modified to transmit the digital number from the Talking Signs in Yerba Buena Gardens) has been "duct-taped" will be able to navigate through the Gardens in addition to hearing the messages from the signs themselves.
Phase 2: The schedules of MUNI, BART, and CalTrans systems will be accessible along with directions to their access points. This will be further refined to include the ability to enter a destination and get a "tailored" schedule for the trip.
Phase 3: Schedules of select "events of interest" and various public facilities (entertainment, library/museum, government buildings, Moscone Center activities) will be appropriately revealed upon request by the user.
All of the information about all of this stuff will be on the Web and attained via a wireless connection thereto.
[edit] Technical Detail
-- notes by danbri, Jun 29 2002
Our job here is to flesh out the technical issues surrounding such a goal. We take RDF as our representational basis. This means we need:
* RDF descriptions of the garden, navigation points around the garden, and related services, features etc. linking out to Web content for taxis, events etc. * An RDF schema that provides basic representational scaffolding for such purposes, ie. defining concepts relating to location, navigations etc. * RDF database and query systems (eg. Squish; Inkling, RubyRDF) * Use cases / sample queries / prototype UI (hmm, maybe I should have listed this first ;-) see Wiliam's note on the TroubleWithMenus for ideas about appropriate UI to the aggregated dataset
What do we have currently?
* some .wav files for waypoints (short and long versions): I've put these online, hope this ok: Yerba WAV files. Also included a rough start at RDF descriptions of those locations. * danbri's RDF Schema for MOO: RDF MOO notes, see moo and verboo in these sample RDF files. * some RDF software: Inkling, RubyRDF * MOO based stuff: jamud kif schema, logicMOOMt.kif and http://12.225.207.235/~logicmoo/ontologies/kif/ others]
What do we lack?
* proper use cases * full RDF descriptions of gardens * prototype UI * any hardware knowhow / design
[edit] Design Notes
Feel free to add more design notes, urls etc here.
[edit] Yerba Buena Gardens - Information Sources
Everything I can find that describes the gardens and associated activites is linked here. Please add more. These links just go to show how fragmented things are, with useful facts smeared across a dozen or more sites of varying quality, accessibility, usability. Where a site has an event listing or calendar page, I've linked to that, since harvesting event info and schedules is probably the simplest and most practical way we can start to integrate data about life in the gardens.
* Virtual Reality tour of Yerba Gardens (uses QuickTime VR) * http://web.archive.org/web/20011031024913/www.yerbabuenaarts.org/about/garden_tour.htm * Exploring the 'Other Stuff' at Yerba Buena Gardens, by Janis Cooke Newman (NOE Valley Voice, 1999), excerpted below. * Yerba Bueana Centre for the Arts, especially their
online calendar (unframed link.
* Yerba Beuna Gardens Festival, including
online calendar (uses Javascript fancy stuff), and concerts, festivals and events page (itself a wrapper for pages that describe the actual events lined up).
* Yerba Buena Alliance home page (wasn't working last I looked) * Yerba Buena Ice Skating Center, notable for an imagemap photo of the gardens showing various landmarks. * Moscone Centre, event calendar (note they have a 'link your sites event listings form', so may be interested in automation of such things). The calendar pages are framed, but the main information is available from one document. The event data appears quite structured, probably exported from a database or spreadsheet. It has an event name, a (sometimes rather generic) URI for each event, a location within Moscone Center, date or date-range, a category and a contact within the centre identified by initials and email address. * Children's Playground (part of Skating Centre website). Brief description and photo. * Zeum (see also skating rink pages), "formerly the Studio for the Technology and the Arts, is an interactive arts center where kids and teens explore and produce visual, performing and media arts using technology as a creative tool." * chefmoz.org review of Arts Center 701 Cafe. * digital city entry for same, venuemap (mapquest-supplied), see also what's nearby? lookup form, (and results)
[edit] Excerpts
- We're at the Yerba Buena Bowling Center at Yerba Buena Gardens, a complex that includes
- an ice skating rink, a restored carousel, a children's playground, and the new
- Zeum Art & Technology Center.
The ABC's of YBC
The Yerba Buena Bowling Center, at Fourth and Folsom streets, is open Sunday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.; and Friday and Saturday, 9 a.m. until midnight. Adult prices are $3.50 per game; kids under 12 play for $2 a game. Shoe rental is $2 a pair. The 12 lanes can fill up on weekends, so it's best to reserve a lane by calling 415-777-3726.
The Yerba Buena Ice Skating Rink, located at 750 Folsom St., on the rooftop of Moscone Center, is open for public skating Monday through Friday from 1 to 5 p.m. On weekends, public skating is from 1 to 2:30 p.m. and from 3:30 to 5 p.m. There's evening skating starting at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Rates are $6 for adults, $4.50 for children 12 and under. Skate rental is $2.50. Note: It's chilly inside the rink, so bring something warm to wear. Call 415-777-3727 for the scoop.
Zeum, the museum at Yerba Buena Gardens (Fourth and Howard), is open Wednesday through Friday, noon to 6 p.m.; and weekends, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $7 for adults, $5 for kids 5 to 18. You can find out more by calling 415-777-2800 or logging on to Zeum's web site at http://www.zeum.org/
The glass-enclosed Playland Carousel, also in Yerba Buena Gardens at Fourth and Howard, operates Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. It's $1 per ride on the merry-go-round.
[edit] Maps
We need a good map of the area. Various of the above sites have some form of map, but they're all pretty partial. Searching mapquest.com didn't work for me either, but I don't really know what I'm looking for. I gathered a bunch more links here just now, but my browser crashed before I saved my changes.
* mapquest search results * yahoomaps? * satellite photos?
[edit] Related Stuff
* see Dave Pawson's work on voicing SVG * and various links on Jim Ley's site. * Dave Pawson's collection of RDF-related docs and links * RDFWeb co-depiction experiment * Jim Marston * Edd's IBM developerworks article on FOAF * Joshua Allen, 'Making a Semantic Web'. * Designing the Accessible Web Museum: If I Can Experience It, Everyone Can Experience It Better, Jeffrey J. Moyer (Museums on the Web 2002). * Adding Value to Large Multimedia Collections Through Annotation Technologies and Tools: Serving Communities of Interest, Paul Shabajee and Libby Miller, (Museums on the Web 2002).
[edit] Example Route Plan
The following itinarary is taken from the Bay area transit web site, where I entered 'Yerba Buena Gardens' to '2318 Fillmore Street' as my route. Note also the commitment the transitinfo.org site makes to Web accessibility, which extends to offering alternate representations of this info on request. We might ask for an RDF/XML view into the database, for example, once we've figured out more details of what we want to know. Anyway, the sample route follows:
Trip Itinerary for today, arriving by 9:33a:
Depart: Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco Then walk to: N.W. Corner Of Sutter St. & Kearny St. (walking map) Board: San Francisco Muni Route 2: 32nd & Anza at 9:14a (next bus 9:29a - detail) Fare: Pay $1.00 Get off: Sutter St. & Fillmore St. at 9:27a Walk to: 2318 Fillmore Street in San Francisco (walking map) Total Travel Time: 24 min Total Cash Fare: $1.00
[edit] Event Guides
Some of the information about Yerba is going to be relatively static. Other parts will be time variant. Information will live in various places and formats, and be aggregated variously. We particularly value event listings data: what's on, where it's on, etc.
There is a bunch of prior work on data formats for this which we can build on. The iCalendar work from the IETF, the www-rdf-calendar task force of the RDF Interest Group, the Events extension module for the RSS 1.0 syndication format, and (perhaps most interestingly in this context) the use of a special flavour of XHTML to describe events in a way that allows RSS/event RDF descriptions to be automatically extracted with an XSLT transformation. If this is jargon, take a look at an example.
On the SWAD-Europe pages at W3C, we have an event listings page. The event descriptions are maintained as a simple HTML document, with the following minimal constraints: the HTML is actually wellformed XHTML, so the page can be processed with XML tools. The bits of the page that talk about events use extra decorations so we can extract RDF from it more reliably. See the foot of that page for a link to the extracted RSS/RDF feed.
We should be able to use such a technique in the Yerba Buena Gardens demo. For one or more event listings related to locations in the park, prepare an XHTML page listing those events. RDF extracted from that page can them be merged into our queryable database, allowing answers to questions such as 'what events are at this location later today? ...later this week?'. In the course of doing this, we should be able to offer some constructive feedback to the designers of RDF vocabularies for events, since we will have a strong emphasis on merging event feeds with other information, such as description of places and organisations.
Related event-listing links (todo -- help welcomed with finding these URLs):
* iCalendar * www-rdf-calendar task force; home page, mailing list, archives, xml.com article, status report... * skiCal work, esp overview paper * RSS * libby's various demos * Bill Kearney's blogchalking experiment, see web form at http://www.syndic8.com/~wkearney/meta/metamaker.php
[edit] About This Document
This is a collaboratively authored work, created initially by Dan Brickley (June 29 2002) by extracting and summarising various of William Loughborough's emails on the project, and trying to cross-reference these with the raw technical and informational resources we have to hand. Do please feel free to add and augment content. Links to related work, info sources etc. would in particular be greatly appreciated. If you add substantial content, please sign and date those paragraphs so we know roughly who said what. -- danbri@rdfweb.org June 2002
