About the project
Data
Since all the data forming the project is pulled from Freebase, here's a brief explanation of what Freebase is. Taken from their Website: Freebase is an open, shared database of the world's knowledge. A lot of people like to see it as an organized Wikipedia, where all the information rests in fields, instead of all being part of a same container. It is free to use, contribute and access, it hosts any type of topic and works with the concept of “bases”. It is their word for a topic really, which anyone can create if it does not already exist. You can assign types to these topics and even create schemas through their Schema Editor.
They also have very nice developer tools, such as the MQL Query Editor to test and run your queries, along with detailed documentation explaining how to build applications using Freebase for Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, Javascript, etc.. I have used the php libraries for this project, which allows me to retrieve the info and convert it to an xml file.
Modes
The project has 3 different modes : GatMode (default), CoffinMode and SpitMode
 | Gat mode is the default mode when the program loads up. It arranges all the albums found in tiles which can be clicked, bringing us to the fullscreen image found for this album/artist. Individual tiles are organized in order that they are found on freebase. The amount of tiles loaded is always the same, and this goes for all modes. |
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Coffin mode takes all the album covers and stretches them out vertically so that only a few pixels of every image |
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Spit mode (spit referring to the lyric of a hip-hop song) presents a clickable ordered list of all the albums and artists available in the application. Similar to the other modes, clicking an artist/album will launch fullscreen mode showing detailed information about the chosen artist. |
Credits
This project was done in November/December 2008 for Brad Todd’s CART 451 Interactive Multimedia class at Concordia University by Laurier Rochon. It has been presented to the class as the final project for the semester.