ShareYourNoggin :: Platform Mathematica

André Mitra

Geometria Research and Design, Inc.

What is "Share Your Noggin : Platform Mathematica"

Share Your Noggin : Platform Mathematica is a powerful content management system that allows you to share your "WebMathematica Pages", "Mathematica Demonstrations", "Mathematica Expressions" with others across the Internet.

How it works

You organize your Mathematica Content in a hierarchy using tags and you index your Mathematica Content using keywords. The root of a tag is a group, and since groups are accessible by their members across the Internet, you can share your Mathematica Content with others across the Internet.

You can access share your noggin using a Web Browser, an iPhone or Mathematica.

Personalizable Space

Your home page is your personalizable space. It has a menu bar, a search field, a sidebar and twelve user accessible areas. There are some extra areas that are used for administration tasks, template channels and sponsor channels, but these areas cannot be personalized. An area contains any number of channels arranged in an "accordion structure" so that only one channel may be viewed at a time. Each personalizable area may be accessed by pressing a button in the square array at the top of the sidebar. The middle of the sidebar contains channel navigation and various areas that provide administration tasks such as access to groups, access to support and templates for channels. The bottom of the sidebar contains channels that are published by our sponsors. From the menu, you can customize your channels and you can change your layout.

Content

Content can be anything that can be placed in an SQL database. However, all content is associated with a standard RSS Feed item, which includes a title, a description, a link and other meta information. The link points to the content, which can be any content in our database, or to an external resource on the internet or our server. As mentioned below, this RSS link often points to a channel that can be associated with several internal and/or external resources. All RSS items are tagged by groups and categories, and indexed by keywords. The tagging structure is hierarchial in a similar way to the file system found on a computer, or if you prefer, to the Mathematica context path system. The root of a tag is always a group and so a tag has the form, group/category/sub-category/...

Groups

Each user belongs to his/her private group, a group that contains no other users. A user can create groups of any size and can belong to any number of other groups.

Sharing Content

Content is always tagged by at least one private group, the private group of the owner of the content. Content that is tagged by a group can be viewed by all members of the group, but can only be modified by the owner of the content. To add content to a group, the owner of the content just adds the group tag associated with the group to the content.

Channels

Channels can contain anything that can be placed or embedded on a web page. We will give examples of the fetcher channel and various other channels that are useful to Mathematica Users.

 A fetcher channel is associated with one or more tags and zero or more keywords. It uses its tags and keywords as a filter to pull content from our database. For a user to fetch content from our database, the user must have at least one tag whose root is a group to which the user belongs. In other words, a user can only fetch content from his or her groups. Content in our database can be tagged with a rating. A fetcher will only pull content whose rating is consistent with the user's rating. Content in our database can be tagged as secure. A fetcher will only pull secure content from our database if the connection from client to server is a secure SSL connection.
 
 A WebMathematica channel embeds a WebMathematica page in a channel. We do not host this WebMathematica page and you create the channel by providing the location of this page on the Internet. We provide style information that you can add to your WebMathematica page.
 
 A Demonstration Channel embeds a one dimensional path of snapshots of a demonstration in a "skimming viewer". The path does not have to be along one slider but may be any one dimensional path through the set of all snapshots of your demonstration. Although snapshots can simply be pictures, to keep in the spirit of a "demonstration", WebMathematica can be used to create the snapshots. In fact, we provide a WebMathematica channel that generates snapshots of a demonstration and caches them in a location pointed to by a viewer channel. We do not host the WebMathematica page, the demonstration or the snapshots. So, when you create your channel, you must provide these locations on the Internet.
 
 Some other interesting channels are 1) calculate channels , which embed a Wolfram Calculate Search in a channel, 2)  expression channels, which embed a Mathematica Expression in a channel, 3) profile channels, which allow you to share your profile, 4) google search channels, 5) group membership request channels and 6) group advertisement channels.

Search or Drill to add channels to your home page

Content created by our user base is available through our "search by keyword" and "drill by tag" system. If you remember, all content is associated with a standard RSS Feed item, which includes a title, a description, a link and other meta information. The search and drill system pulls filtered collections of these items that depends on the groups of the user and the tags and keywords involved. The search and drill pages include an "add this to my page" button which allows the user to create a fetcher channel of the drill or search. Other channels can be created by clicking on the links of certain RSS items.

Creation of Channels

Fetcher channels are automatically created when a user clicks the  "add this to my page" on a search or drill page. Other channels must be created using a template. We have included various templates and sponsors can include their own templates. When a channel is created, an associated RSS item is also created. The link of this RSS item points to the channel. To tag and keyword the channel, the user tags and keywords this associated RSS item. The user can share the channel with others across the internet by tagging the associated RSS item with one or more group tags.

Serving Secure RSS Feed Pages

When a user uses Mathematica or an iPhone to connect to share your noggin, the user's layout temporarily switches in order to serve content that is in a form suitable for Mathematica or the iPhone. For instance, search and drill pages serve secure RSS Feed pages.

RSS 2.0

Share your Noggin is RSS 2.0 friendly and can import, export and serve its content or content meta information in the RSS 2.0 format or any extension of this format.

Summary

Share Your Noggin allows you to share your "WebMathematica Pages", "Mathematica Demonstrations", "Mathematica Expressions" with others across the Internet.

Feel free to contact me at <andre@geometria.net>.