The touchgraph tool is the creation of Alf Eaton of HubLog. It's a Java applet which takes advantage of the FOAF data accompanying each contributor's record in order to produce a dynamic, relational graph: an expandable tree of who's connected to whom in the Catalog. You can double-click each name to extend a node, or click the little green "info" flag for a link to that person's record, and explore away!
Here's Henry Reed's touchgraph (click to open applet):
(Tip: if the links to the Catalog aren't working, reconfigure your browser's options to allow popups!) There's even a handy bookmarklet to launch the applet from inside the Catalog. Thank you, Alf!
The sparkline comparator is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox which enables you to overlay two different sparklines in the Catalog for comparison: the little graphs displaying the frequency of a person's contributions to the BBC. Everything you need to get started using the comparator is available from its author, Phil McCarthy, over at chimpen.com.
This is how Henry Reed's sparkline looks (in black), superimposed with that of his frequent producer, Douglas Cleverdon (red):
You can see the spikes for the majority of Reed's radio plays coincide with a jump for Cleverdon's productions. Isn't that neat? Thanks, Phil!
Now, what the hell is SPARQL?
