about

the idea

The idea behind wectar is the fusion of two worlds, dmoz.org (open directory project) and delicious.com. This fusion is seen by us as a mutual enrichment of two stages in the evolution of the world wide web

• web 1.0, expert knowledge based content (dmoz.org)
• web 2.0, social community driven content (delicious.com,dmoz.org)

1.0 + 2.0 = 3.0. Welcome to wectar, a pioneer of web 3.0. For sure not. Nevertheless the reemerging of expert knowledge within the wonderful creative social chaos of web 2.0 will most likely be one of the elements of the next web evolution step and as in our example here a combination of both definitely proofs interesting.

• delicious.com brings all the power of community popularity feedback to this directory and opens through its tagging system the door to dynamically interrelating web sites beyond the given fixed directory structure.
• The high quality of the carefully reviewed web sites listed at dmoz.org allows us to focus on web sites of more lasting value within the overwhelming flow of sometimes only temporary interesting pages bookmarked at delicious.com. Also the well thought directory structure of dmoz.org gives us some uniform orientation beyond the tagging information offered by the delicious.com community.

What makes both of these two great services for sure true pioneers of web 3.0 is their generosity of making their unique knowledge available for mashups like wectar. Obviously wectar couldn't be without this generosity. We hope that we can repay this kindness to some extend by promoting both services through our web site.

So how do we prepare the wectarian soup out of these two rich ingredients? Just check it out, wectar is ready for you. And don't forget to expect a link behind nearly every information displayed.

how it works

Wectar retrieves its dmoz information from the dmoz rdf dump. By that it doesn't generates traffic on the dmoz page itself through using live data. This strategy might has the drawback of the need to update the database regularly and not being always top up to date, but seems to be the more appropriate setup for a web service aspiring to be more than just another dmoz mirror and most important gives the response time of the web page in our hands.

While delicious.com offers a very handy open API, it asks users not to use this API to harvest the provided information excessively. Wectar respects this. We mainly learn about delicious tag informations by saving every delicious information displayed on our web page through user interaction. In addition we moderately retrieve information through own interaction with the delicious.com API.

future plans

Wectar has just started. While we are convinced that wectar already offers a promising service - even to the extend that we are using it ourselves occasionally - many more ideas are ready to get implemented including

• A full text search facility on the listed web sites rather than the meta search facility offered right now.
• Further enhanced visual user interfaces for the directory, implemented with flare.

Wectar sees itself as part of the search for new ways to manage the exploding amount of information on the web. While the handling of this amount of data is for now beyond the scale of this project we will focus our efforts in the near future mainly on

• improving our ability to find 'hidden' interrelations between web sites
• finding new ways of representing these web of information

So stay in touch and see what we have to contribute.

Bored to wait and see? Great, your feedback is of course most welcome and might even steer the direction in which this project goes.

cooperation

Wectar has achieved proof of concept status and happily invites interested partner now to brainstorm with us about possible cooperations.

Please contact us