I think you should check out Metamaps. I like the way they present the project, and invite others to use and develop the software.
Also, I think they get some stuff right about the tagging, visual tagging (some symbols) for community use in addition to just text.
Maybe something to learn from for how we present edgesense and OpenEthnographer as products?
I’d also like to know how we can ensure that we are differentiated from what they are doing or develop some difference.
What is it you like?
I am not sure what part of their website you are looking at. I watched the video, which is professionally made.
OE is meant for research use. This means each ethnographer or team of ethnographers will necessarily have to make their own taxonomy: they are not going to care very much about icons and the like. The need for customization is so strong that @Inga_Popovaite insists mostly on being able to iteratively change the taxonomy during the research work; merging and renaming tags, and re-arranging them into a changing hierarchy. This is what we have been calling the “code manager”.
One feature that I like from the earliest OE prototype is that codes are grouped into categories (meta-codes), and the latter are color-coded. This makes for interesting visualization somewhere down the line.
As a presentation layer for the future, sth like this could fit
As Alberto says, Open Ethnographer is for research use, so in this revision it won’t be too pretty. However, I try to prepare it already for public reuse of the data aggregated by researchers. True, every researcher develops their own taxonomy, but all that semantic tagging is valuable data that just begs for reuse – possible by relating the individual taxonomies to some broader concepts.
This leads to integration with the semantic web as these broader concepts are basically terms in existing semantic web vocabularies. But that’s of use just for other software (other websites being able to query ours about stuff). A double use for non-researchers could however be a visual navigation tool, similar to the one of Metamaps. For example, see the WissKI Graph Tool – WissKI itself it’s a boring but Drupal-integrated museology toolkit, but the graph tool works on the type of semantic data that will come out as the public interface of ethnographers’ codings.
It’s for the future though. But thanks for the inspiration 