Another Word For It

Introducing DocDiver by Al Shaw. The ProPublica Nerd Blog

From the post:

Today [4 Oct. 2011] we’re launching a new feature that lets readers work alongside ProPublica reporters—and each other—to identify key bits of information in documents, and to share what they’ve found. We call it DocDiver [1].

Here’s how it works:

DocDiver is built on top of DocumentViewer [2] from DocumentCloud [3]. It frames the DocumentViewer embed and adds a new right-hand sidebar with options for readers to browse findings and to add their own. The “overview” tab shows, at a glance, who is talking about this document and “key findings”—ones that our editors find especially illuminating or noteworthy. The “findings” tab shows all reader findings to the right of each page near where readers found interesting bits.

Graham Moore (Networkedplanet) mentioned early today that the topic map working group should look for technologies and projects where topic maps can make a real difference for a minimal amount of effort. (I’m paraphrasing so if I got it wrong, blame me, not Graham.)

This looks like a case where an application is very close to having topic map capabilities but not quite. The project already has users, developers and I suspect would be interested in anything that would improve their software, without starting over. That would be the critical part, to leverage existing software an imbue it with subject identity as we understand the concept, to the benefit of current users of the software.