About PICT

What is PICT?

PICT provides a set of tools designed to enhance the website on which they appear and include that website in a community of other PICT enabled websites. Tools to help users describe and categorise the resources a website provides and to communicate publicly with others using those resources.

"Big wow! Loads of websites provide such tools one way or another...". It's true they do and such tools are often integral to various well known web-apps. Below we've tried to define what makes PICT different:

PICT is not...

• ..."embedded" in the application that runs your website.

  Blogging software, for instance, will include facilities for commenting and tagging, but these will scoped to that particular blog providing no opportunity link people or concepts across different websites.

• ...a third party website.

  There are various "social" apps that allow users to bring together their thoughts on disperate web-resources. These are valuable things, but need to be sought out by the user and can sometimes provide too wide a scope.

• ...a downloadable toolbar.

  There are some lovely add-ons and browser extensions that really enhance user-experience. Some are even combined with third party websites that allow toolbar users to share what they have done from the safety of their own machines with the wider world. Again such apps need to be sought out, and the more casual user may miss the boat.

PICT is...

• ...available to more than a single website.

  It is designed to work with a community of shared interest users. It can be deployed on any number of websites that relate to a given interest. Tools available to a PICT "community" of websites are managed by a single PICT server.

• ...part of the community.

  The PICT server can be downloaded and run by anyone and as such the technology can belong to the community it is serving. The PICT client can be branded to so that it an easily recognisable face of the community.

• ...available to anyone who uses your website.

  The PICT client is a javascript app that the website owner installs. It is available to anyone who uses the website (or not if they don't fancy). A descrete tab is appended to your website and the users can choose to click on this to access the tools (or not).

PICT client

The PICT client is a browser-side script that can be added to a website so that any person access that site has the opportunity to access a range of community-scoped tools. Web sites that have the PICT client installed become a part of the "community" of related web sites that are managed by the PICT server.

PICT server

The Pict server is a Database driven PHP application that manages the requests and other interactions of the tools provided by PICT clients to number of websites. A group of websites with a PICT client installed and referencing the same Pict-Server form a community for which data can be shared, analysed and aggregated.

Who is PICT for?

Conditions for the existence (and evolution) of PICT...

• A community (research or otherwise) use a range of disperate but related websites to access data of one form or another.
• This community likes to talk to each other and values the opinions of other memebers of that community.
• One or more of the people who run one or more of the websites decide to set up a PICT server and deploy a PICT client on their website.
• Members of the community find they have a way to share their knowledge about the resources they use without needing to leave the website on which they exist.
• The community finds that they can use PICT to move between related resources on different websites that have installed the PICT client, what's more the identity they have used to access, record and share their knowledge moves with them.
• The poeple who run other websites that are of interest to the community install a PICT client and the community grows.
• The knowlegde recorded by users while visiting their favourite old websites can now be ammassed to provide a powerful resource for the entire community.
• The community grows some more...

How do I use PICT?

How can I get PICT?

PICT at google code.