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.

open kimono

I've been having a bit of a crisis concerning the "to blog, or not to blog" question in the context of my currently academic career. Of the three junior faculty members I've spoken with on the subject (aside from my supervisor who is less junior..) they all unanimously agree that:

1. Blogging about a good idea before it is published is a waste of time because:


• someone will steal it and claim it as their own


• you won't get any credit for it anyway until you republish it in a proper (peer-reviewed) journal


• the whole peer-review cycle is actually an extremely useful mechanism for improving the content of published work and it is just plain wrong (and arrogant) to skip it.


• blogging is more about self-promotion than about the distribution of ideas

Well you know what.. I'm just going to do it anyway and see what happens!

I think these ideas are flawed by the misconception that anyone wants or thinks that blogs will replace peer-reviewed journals in science. To me they are a natural way to collate and communicate my thoughts as they happen - which is a completely different purpose than sharing the results of an experiment (thought or otherwise) with my peers. If someone "steals" one of my ideas, they will still have to go through the pain of actually conducting the experiment or building the model before they can publish anything on it anyway. In the meantime, the other 99% of the people that actually bother to read what I write will likely have helped me come to a better understanding of it - quickly pushing me back ahead of those terrifying intellectual thieves feared to be lurking on the other side of the Google one way mirror, just waiting to scoop a flowering idea (career..) out of the ground before it starts.

So here you go - This presentation describes (in not very much detail) what I am currently up to in the areas of open social systems designed to grow the semantic web (knowledge gardening) and automatic ontology evaluation.