Phylo is built on top of two major open-source platforms: the Drupal content management system and the SIMILE family of JavaScript data management tools. At the moment, Phylo uses SIMILE’s Timeline on the main site and Exhibit on the new philosophy job wiki.
At its core, Phylo is a database of professional information about academic philosophers, from which we can infer professional connections and relationships among those philosophers. Drupal gives us the ability to keep track of that information in a relational database, and it lets users view and manipulate that data in various ways. We’re using a lot of off-the-shelf modules that have been contributed by Drupal’s users, but we’ve also added a lot of modifications of our own, including a custom interface written in jQuery.
The SIMILE Project, started at MIT, provides a suite of software that lets you do all kinds of great things with data on the “client side” (i.e., on the end user’s computer). For instance, Timeline lets us plot a person’s academic career on a timeline or display a timeline of the faculty and students in a given department. Exhibit enables users to filter and sort the data in all kinds of ways.
Both Drupal and SIMILE have fairly steep learning curves, and it’s often frustrating to get them to play nicely together, but we think the products that you can create with the two of them are worth the effort. Besides, they’re both open source, and we’re big fans of the open source software movement.
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