Why you might want to start using ED in addition to your normal tags

The images in the picture are from the first page of results for a Google image search for "hippocampus", which, to the best of my knowledge, relies exclusively on automatically extracted tags from text surrounding the image or from the tags collected by the Google image labeling game. The yellow box in the middle represents the normal tag "hippocampus" and the blue boxes represent the equivalent ED tags.

Things to notice:

With ED tags, the three different senses of the word are captured through reference to the appropriate ontology.

The context and the meaning of these 'semantic' tags are created through the links between the terms.

Using the structure found in the ontologies, the ED tagged images can be found in a number of ways aside from querying by the exact tag. E.g. queries for "Mythical Creatures", "Brain", and "Chordata" can all be answered effectively by the ED system.

Seems pretty cool doesn't it? Why not give it a try and let me know what you think? Thanks for any thoughts...

Some progress with and some motivation for ED

Eddie and I have made some good progress on the ED application. We've got the first set of bugs taken care of and are getting ready for the first big public announcement. The only remaining must-do is the completion of the query expansion script. When that is done and tested (at least twice!) I'm going to move the database / servlets over to a dedicated computer and spam my friends..

Lots of people, including my supervisor, have expressed some uncertainty about why I am doing this - so I think it might be a good idea to try to clarify my motivations a bit. Perhaps this will even help encourage people to try it out.

The central thrusts of my research are to 1) identify ways that 'ordinary' people (non-computer scientists) can help to build the semantic web and 2) to motivate them to do so. One of the fundamental pieces of the semantic web is the description of web resources (URIs - especially URLs) with concepts from web-accessible ontologies. Thus, it would be great if I could figure out a way to get normal people to start forming these connections.

In social tagging applications, like Connotea and Del.icio.us, I see a tremendous number of people contributing a new, significant, but inherently limited form of meta-data to the web in the form of tags. The motivation question does not seem to be a problem here. They are putting their descriptions of the web (metadata) online, for free, but the problem is that these descriptions are represented in their own individual, unstructured, unshared, typically unplanned and unconnected terminologies (tag collections) rather than the shared, structured ontologies that might someday form the backbone of the semantic web. ED is an attempt to build a new variety of social tagging application that continues to satisfy the personal information management needs of the populace while at the same time producing information collections that are more useful, both to the individual taggers and to the semantic web community through the use of ontologies.

Would love to hear what you think about all of this!