About Virgil

Virgil is a context-sensitive media-driven browser.  Context-sensitive means it tries to maintain a consistent idea of time, location, photos, and people throughout its various operations.  Media-driven means it exploits the user's normal interaction with his own media to find related information.

The point of the Virgil project is to see how we can help people enrich the stories of their life experiences.  It attempts to do so by connecting a person's personal media, particularly photos, to related information on the local computer, on the WWW, and in the private and personal information stores of friends, family, and community, wherever they may be.

Developer info

Virgil is a .NET application, includes a simple installer, and has a plug-in architecture that makes it easy to extend with new context-sensitive functionality.  It is built atop numerous open source components and web-based services, including:

• SQLite, SQLite.NET

• Microsoft MapPoint Web Services, and TerraService

• Google Maps, Google Earth

• Flickr, the Flickr API, and Flickr.NET

• Yahoo geocoding API

• Search from a variety of providers including Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft

• NASA World Wind

• a few miscellaneous others

Availability

Virgil has been available to HP-internal users for over two years, and the intent was to distribute it for free non-commercial use outside HP, but "big company" issues have made that a challenge.  Feedback from potential users, developers, or collaborators can help me make a case to the powers-that-be to get past these hurdles and set it loose.  If you are motivated, send me an e-mail with your opinion by clicking one of the three links below.  Feel free to include additional comments

• I want Virgil to be open sourced

• I want to be able to install & run Virgil, and use its SDK to extend it

• Don't waste my time with Virgil!