Semantic Web
Danny Hillis on the Knowledge Web March 14, 2007
In the wake of Danny Hillis's Metaweb project launch, Edge has just published a follow-up to his 2004 essay, Aristotle: The Knowledge Web. Here Hillis does a good job of articulating the project's basic premise: In retrospect the key idea...
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Metaweb March 9, 2007
Supercomputer pioneer Danny Hillis's new Metaweb project is an ambitious effort to create a user-generated database mapping the relationships between a potentially endless array of topics. It sounds like an impossibly far-reaching project, but if anyone can pull something like...
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Very Small Objects May 23, 2005
The Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects provides an ingenious framework for cataloging itty bitty things. (via plasticbag)...
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Tags as ideology April 20, 2005
Gene Smith has written an excellent critique of Clay Shirky's Ontology is Overrated thesis. While I'm as burned out as anyone by now with windbagging about tags and folksonomies, I do think Gene makes several refreshingly new points here. In...
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Folksonomic zeitgeist February 28, 2005
The Observer is playing around with folksonomies, asking all of their contributors to classify their articles using free-form keywords, then exposing the emerging folksonomy via the newspaper's blog. What's interesting here is the attempt to marry a top-down hierarchy (newspaper...
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Sandy Berman, Freetagging Old School January 24, 2005
Back in the 1970s, Sanford (Sandy) Berman, the head cataloger at Hennepin County Library in Minnesota, did something librarians rarely do: He started making up his own subject headings. Flouting the prevailing Library of Congress cataloging standards, Berman sparked a...
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Folksonomies and language January 18, 2005
Languages are much on my mind these days in light of some work I've been doing with the Rosetta Project. While I won't pretend to be any kind of linguist, it does seem that open Web-based systems are contributing to...
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Musicplasma January 5, 2005
Musicplasma creates visualizations of collaborative filtering data about musical artists. While these kinds of hyperbolic treemaps are hardly a new idea, I think the execution works pretty well here; unlike most of those cloying Brain-style interfaces, I can actually envision...
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New School of Ontologies December 1, 2004
Thomas Vanderwal points us to Nick Mote's paper, "Folksonomies: The New School of Ontologies," a nice rumination on the folksonomies thread that was percolating a few weeks back. One quote I liked: "Folksonomies are the bazaar to the ontology's cathedral."...
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Red books, blue books and the radius of trust October 17, 2004
Caterina points to Valdis Krebs' diagram of implicit communities visible in Amazon's patterns of political book recommendations. While the polarization of American politics hardly comes as news, this visualizatoin paints a stark picture of just how far apart our politics...
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Named entity extraction October 12, 2004
John Battelle describes an intriguing glimpse of Google's forthcoming search clustering technology, from last week's Web 2.0 conference: "Named entity extraction" is a relatively new project called which Norvig said Google had been working on for about six months. As...
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Conundrums, Clusters, Ketchup and Mustard October 11, 2004
Peterme takes Malcolm Gladwell's Ketchup Conundrum as a launching point for pondering the perils of cluster analysis, and finds a juicy analogue between targeted marketing in the packaged food industry ("multidimensional scaling," in marketingspeak) and the non-hierarchical ideal of faceted...
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Google audio search October 4, 2004
Interesting post speculating about a hypothetical Google audio search engine: [T]he search engine will be able to hunt down semantic web information. In plain terms, the search functionality will allow you to search through the metatags (or metadata) of songs,...
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Semantic browser September 14, 2004
Notwithstanding the fact that I can't actually get the thing to run on my PC, I'm intrigued by the latest release of Haystack (mentioned here last year), MIT's ambitious "Universal Information Client," which now incorporates something called a Semantic Web...
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Folksonomies redux September 7, 2004
There's been some follow-up discussion on folksonomies (cf. my earlier post) by Peter, Clay, Victor, and Jon, and what I believe is a related thread about Wikipedia vs. traditional Encyclopedias by Joi, Matt and Cory. Both discussions seem to boil...
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September 3, 2004
Paul Ford is hacking Congress...
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Folksonomy August 23, 2004
Just when I was starting to worry there were no new ideas left in the IA world, a great new meme has cropped up out in the blogspace: social classification, or what Thomas Vander Wal has christened "folksonomies." A folksonomy...
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Salon on social networking June 15, 2004
Andrew Leonard probes the commercial underbelly of social networking services, in You are who you know: Social networking sites are a hotbed for data-miners and marketing strategists, controlled laboratories in which the question of what human beings like to do...
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Network effects April 17, 2004
The recent porn industry HIV scare strikes me as a dark case study in social networking: Some pored over a flier handed out by AIM that named those who had sex with James since his last clean test, and those...
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Topix March 29, 2004
John Battelle on Topix, a new search startup that specializes in filtering news sources through an automated faceted classification algorithm: Skrenta likes to call Topix a “150,000-facet diamond,” at least one facet of which should appeal to most news consumers....
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The Semantic Social Network February 20, 2004
An interesting post by Stephen Downes on the Semantic Social Network: Two types of technologies are about to merge. The technologies are content syndication, used by blogging websites around the world, and social networking, employed by sites such as Friendster...
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January 2, 2004
From FOAF, Flocking and the Semantics of Starlings: [T]he issues the TAG members are discussing are related to what's happening with FOAF among the weblogging community. It is a microcosm of the Semantic Web, with its rich possibilities and its...
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Semantic values December 16, 2003
Here's a quick case study in the value of semantic markup: Froogle vs. Pricegrabber. The still-in-beta Froogle applies Google’s bottom-up, ontology-free ethos to the world of retail, providing merchants and customers with a self-service shopping platform unencumbered by rigid data...
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Semantic heads November 17, 2003
Peter Van Dijk makes a valiant attempt at sorting out the ruckus that ensued from Clay Shirky's Semantic Web article (and puts me in touch with my inner talking head)....
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Shirky on the Semantic Web November 7, 2003
Clay Shirky waxes skeptical about the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms... [and] exposing these kinds of assertions on the Web, so that third parties can combine them to discover things that are true but...
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"Semantic Web," or semantic webs? October 20, 2003
Microsoft's Catherine Marshall and Texas A&M's Frank Shipman have written one of the more cogent assessments to date of the great fuzz-ball of hyperbole that has become "The Semantic Web": What should we expect from the Semantic Web? ... Perhaps...
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The Semantic Web is closer August 22, 2003
The Semantic Web is closer than you think (via iaslash)...
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The semantics of hype April 17, 2002
A lot of smart people (like Tim Berners-Lee) seem convinced that the Semantic Web is the certifiable Next Big Thing. A lot of other smart people (like Tim Bray) think the whole thing is already obscenely over-hyped (after all, the...
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GLUT:
Mastering Information Through the Ages
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“A penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on the information age and its historical roots.”
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