Shift is a tool for bloggers and Web developers, which allows you to publish structured, machine-understandable data to the Web. You can take data from various desktop applications (an address book, a calendar, a bibliography tool, etc.) and let Shift turn them into a chunk of Web data, which you can then embed in your blog post or Web page.
One of the main goals of Shift is to make the creation of machine-understandable data as easy as possible. That’s why, in Shift, you can simply reuse the data you have already created in other applications. You can do this by simply dragging and dropping things into Shift, or even by just typing a few letters of their description and then use autocomplete. But since a movie says more than a thousand pictures, and a picture says more than a thousand words, you may just want to look at a screencast of Shift!
Plugins & Formats
Shift supports input and output of data in various formats. The output formats for publishing your data are e.g., RDFa and Microformats (soon :).
The input formats are determined by the plugins that Shift uses. Currently, the following plugins are available:
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AddressBook Plugin: The plugin for the Mac OS X AddressBook let’s you take any of your contacts (either people, organizations or groups) and turn them into Web data. Currently, the only supported output format is RDFa. If you choose this, the plugin will generate a representation of the selected contact in the FOAF vocabulary. |
| ical Plugin: This plugin lets you turn events from your Apple’s iCal calendar into Web Data. Currently, the only supported output format is RDFa. If you choose this, the plugin will generate a representation of the selected event in icalendar RDF vocabulary as suggested by the W3C calendar working group. | |
| BibDesk Plugin: This is a plugin for the excellent BibDesk, an application for organizing BibTeX references to scientific (and other) publications. Currently, the only supported output format is RDFa. The RDFa output will turn your BibTeX entries into Web Data, using the BibTeX RDF vocabulary as suggested in the SWRC ontology. | |
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Knoten Plugin: Knoten is another kantenwerk application, which lets you import RDF graphs from the Web and integrate them with your desktop. With this plugin, you can use the resources from those RDF graphs in Shift as well. |