Courtesy of Nova Spivack's post titled: Tagging and the Semantic Web: Tags as
Objects, I stumbled across a related post by John Clarke
titled: Tagging and the Semantic Web. Both of these
posts use the common practice of tagging to shed light on the
increasing realization that "The Pursuit of Context" is the fusion
point between the current Web and its
evolution into a structured Web of Linked Data.
How Semantic Tagging Works (from a 1000 feet)
When tagging a document, the semantic tagging service passes the
content of a target document through a processing pipeline (a
distillation process of sorts) that results in automagic extraction
of the following:
Once the extraction phase is completed, a user is presented with
a list of "suggested tags" using a variety of user interaction
techniques. The literal values of elected Tags are then associated
with one or more Tag and Tag
Meaning Data
Objects, with each Object type endowed with a unique
Identifier.
Issues to Note
Broad acceptance that: "Context is king", is gradually taking shape.
That said, "Context" landlocked within Literal values
offers little over what we have right now (e.g. at Del.icio.us or
Technorati), long term. By this I mean: if
the end product of semantically enhanced tagging leaves us with:
Literal Tag values only, Tags associated with
Tag Data Objects endowed with platform
specific Identifiers, or Tag Data Objects with any other Identity
scheme that excludes HTTP, the ability of Web users to discern or
derive multiple perspectives from the base Context (exposed by semantically enhanced
Tags) will be lost, or severely impeded at best.
The shape, form, and quality of the lookup substrate that
underlies semantic tagging services, ultimately affects "context fidelity" matters such as Entity Disambiguation. The importance of
quality lookup infrastructure on the burgeoning Linked Data Web is the reason why OpenLink Software is intimately involved
with the DBpedia and UMBEL projects.
Conclusions
I am immensely happy to see that the Web 2.0 and Semantic Web communities are beginning to
coalesce around the issue of "Context". This was the case at the WWW2008 Linked Data Workshop, I am feeling a
similar vibe emerging from the Semantic
Web Technologies conference currently nearing completion in San
Jose. Of course, I will be talking about, and demonstrating
practical utility of all of this, at the upcoming Linked Data
Planet conference.
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