non-anonymous peer review

I spent this afternoon acting as a voluntarily non-anonymous peer reviewer - its scary.  I ended up advocating rejection of the article I was reading and I have to say that Vince Smith(see end of linked post) was absolutely right that the act of signing your review "keeps you in check".  Knowing from the outset that your words are going to be linked to your name can really change what you have to say - it certainly makes you think about it for a while longer.  It is scary though - I hope that I managed to convey enough of my reasoning and suggestions for ways to improve the article that the authors don't despise me and attempt to ruin my life...  I also hope that the editors of the journal manage to acquire at least one additional reviewer for this manuscript - safety in numbers! Or perhaps the editors will strip my name from my comments?  Time will tell I guess.

update to social semantic tagging list

A while back I started to keep track of social semantic tagging projects (other than mine) in a post. Since then, I've continued to add to the list in that post - most recently today. Its starting to feel downright crowded in here - not the feeling you want to have when trying to wrap up the last project for your dissertation.

fret fret

ED as a company

Too bad it wasn't ours...

This video of an interview with ZigTag sums up the basic ideas of the Entity Describer project very nicely. I kind of knew this coming because I thought this was such a good idea.. but it is a touch heart-breaking to see something you've worked on produced, packaged, and sold by some one else. Makes me wonder why I ever went to grad school and what I'm still doing here.



My favorite quote from the interview was "we'll have a better understanding of the Web then Google does.." - nothing like being bold. It has a ring of truth in that the semantic tags added by people and not by a text indexing algorithm have some major advantages - notable higher precision and the ability to tag non-textual content; however, its not going to know anything about the vast majority of the Web that remains untagged by people. There are ways their knowledge base can be used in that effort, but thats old news..

My least favorite quote from the interview relates to that knowledge base - "we want you to use tags that are actually defined by us". For most people that might be alright, as long as they can generally find the tags they are looking for and the service works for them they will probably be happy; however, it seems that many people might like to have some control over the both what semantic tags they have access to and what the semantics of those tags actually are (especially developers). By hooking up to both the ontologies of the semantic web and the topics in freebase, the entitydescriber concept keeps that aspect of the system completely open. That aspect is important and remains, perhaps, the best reason to keep going with the project.