Semantic Tagging Projects

As I mentioned in the last post, I've recently discovered a few other social bookmarking services that utilize semantic tags. (Though they all have their own take on what "semantic" means of course). Here are some links to the ones I've found so far, please let me know if I've missed any.

1. ZigTag is ".. an intelligent, semantic, social tagging and bookmarking service". ZigTag is a new company, based in Edmonton, that seems to be seeking to replace Delicious as the de facto standard for social bookmarking on the web. Its semantic tags are drawn from its own database, culled automatically from public sources and soon to be made API accessible. The service works as a FireFox (Explorer in development) side-bar extension and as a bookmarklet. They are currently in private beta.
2. Fuzzy is "a Web 2.0 organic ontology collaborative socio-semantic polyscopic web research project". It is currently the product of Roy Lachica, a graduate student at the University of Oslo. The description of the project on the about page of the website is, intentionally I believe, fuzzy... but I did gather that the representation used for the semantic tags is based on topic maps and that the tags are created by the users using editing tools available on the website. I found it a bit strange that the tagging activity seems to be separate from the bookmarking activity. When I went to add a bookmark, the bookmarklet let me specify the URL, a name, whether it was private, a description, what kind of resource it was {webpage, tool, video, etc.}, geographic context, mood {fact, fun, business, or compassion}, knowledge type {why and if, how, what where who when} and details level {overview, detailed}. However, there wasn't any option to tag the post. This happens later on, within the context of the fuzzzy website. This seems to be part of their drive to get users actively editing their "folktology" of tags. For more info, have a look at a fuzzzy conference paper.
3. If Fuzzzy is semantic tagging, then I think Bibsonomy must also be classified as such because it does allow its users to establish relationships between the tags. Bibsonomy is also an academic project and one that has been operational for several years.
4. SemKey is (was?) an Italian academic project that utilizes WordNet and Wikipedia topics as its sources of semantic tags. It was actually presented at the 2007 World Wide Web conference while I was attending a different workshop.. I can't believe I missed it! A quick search didn't turn up any working versions, but they may be lurking out there somewhere.
5. Faviki is the latest semantic tagging project to emerge. It is a google-app engine project that utilizes DBpedia as its source of semantic tags. One thing that I didn't like about it was that there currently doesn't appear to be any way to use tags that aren't in the database. Given my experience so far with the entity describer, which accesses about a million more topics then faviki, I think this is a mistake. I often want to tag with terms that I can't find for some reason such as "social semantic tagging"..
6. MOAT looks like yet another semantic tagger, but it seems to be pushing to be more of a software framework than a distinct application. Interesting that another PhD student that seems to be about the same academic age as me came up with a nearly identical idea. Clearly the time has come! Looks like a nice clean, swebby implementation. Uncertain if anyone is using it.
7. RichTags started as Masters thesis project and now seems to be incorporated specifically into a project to improve the navigation of digital repositories. Users create tags and link them up via SKOS relations (synonymy, broader, narrower, etc.).
   
8. The two versions of the entity describer are both semantic tagging extensions built on top of Connotea. The first, now deprecated, version was a greasemonkey script that accessed an RDF database (that we assembled) of ontologies. The second, currently operational, version replaces the connotea bookmarklet with a new one and uses Freebase as its source of semantic tags.

There are some examples of full text annotation tools, that basically take the semantic tagging concept inside the document, but I think, for now, I'll keep these in their own class separate from the other plain old URI taggers. One of the oldest and most written about of these tools is Annotea by Marja-Riitta Koivunen.

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.

a new scientific social network

 A colleague just pointed out a newish scientific networking site called BiomedExperts that does some things I've been halfheartedly thinking about doing myself quite nicely.  Mainly, they do a good job: 

1. rapidly digging your publications out of Pubmed for you (with a little guidance) 
   
2. showing off the connections to other people that these publications display

Their network exploration applet worked great for me and was fun to use.  I have to say that is probably the first time I've ever been able to say that about a graph viewing applet..  The geo-view of my network wasn't as good, but was still kind of cool.  Pics below.

If anyone knows of some, I'd be curious to hear of other science-niche social networks.

I'll show you mine...

23andme is giving a whole new meaning to the profile page of the social network.  Now you can share your genetic information as well as your relationship status and your interests in underwater basket weaving.  If I had a spare $999.00 I would love to try this out.  Anyone want to sponsor it?  

It brings us closer to the time when my (much mocked) relatedness party game becomes a reality.  The game would be to guess the person at the party that was either the most distant or the closest genetically to you - and then use the (I assume) forthcoming Facebook/23andme application to find out who won.  You could also do celebrity variations and so forth.

So, if I show you mine, will you ???

Music Recommenders

Just wanted to point out a really good post comparing the differences between Last.fm and Pandora (circa January 2006). In a nutshell, both services compile databases used to make decisions about which songs/artists are similar to one another and then use these decisions to create playlists automatically based on some seed (e.g. songs that are somehow like songs from the Beatles).  Last.fm does this mainly by looking at who likes what (data cleverly extracted from things like iTunes via their "scrobbler" as well as through direct user preference statements) while Pandora utilizes manually (by them) annotated musical features of the songs themselves such as "subtle use of vocal harmony" and "mild use of rhythmic syncopation".  

Steve Krause's post is a nice, in-depth look at the differences that hold between these two contrasting approaches to musical knowledge acquisition.  Its a great exploration of professional/intentional/manual versus amateur/extensional/semi-automatic content creation - especially because both services are so good!  The only downside is that the post is now a bit dated.  As he predicted it would, Pandora is definitely picking up and almost certainly applying user-generated data now (its even connected to Facebook) - which makes it harder to segregate the two systems. 

Of course, I'm curious what Pandora might be able to achieve by encouraging and enabling their users to annotate songs for them.  Do you think you could correctly identify the mild use of rhythmic syncopation? I probably couldn't, but it would be cool if they showed me how.

At Last - Last.fm

Last.fm has been on my radar for almost a year but I've just now actually gotten around to trying it out.  In a nutshell , I LOVE IT!  I can't see myself ever using itunes party shuffle ever again...  Its rare to come across something that you immediately know that you will use on a regular basis for the foreseeable future - I think this is the first time thats ever happened to me.

Pulled together automatically by Last from my itunes library...

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!

“Software intended to shape culture” - on talk by Stowe Boyd at Web2.0 Expo

This entry is about a talk given by Stowe Boyd at the Web2.0 expo about "building social applications". Stowe appears to be essentially a professional blogger/high-powered social computing consultant.. His talk was engaging, discussing some simple formula for developing “software intended to shape culture” (apparently a phrase he coined way back in the day when the web was young) and ultimately ending with a slightly sublime insight. Like just about everyone else at this conference, he must have mentioned twitter.com about 20 times in his two hours. He also spent quite a bit of time on last.fm, basecamp.com. Some highlights

“individual is the new group” – so you need to satisfy them (duh.)

“buddylist is the center of the universe” – your connections define you. (See touchgraph.com for a cool visualization of Google’s view of a website’s universe).

Reputation systems are crucial. See eBay’s afterthought system, DIGG’s extensively thought-out adaptive system. “Swarmth” – using the WoC for establishing reputation (which is tightly, importantly related to identity).

Seek successful motifs and add them to your site (tags, wikis, ... ) (duh)

Add mechanisms to import existing social networks into yours
o also related theme is that mashing up various successful apps into yours is no longer just a good idea, it is crucial.

3 steps – “me, mine, market”. Start with an individual purpose (e.g. buy a dress), move through a social space (e.g. ask your ‘friends’, ask experts, talk to people about it somehow..), satisfy purpose in the market (buy the one you want). Very simple recipe for building a “social application”.

Ok, those were the basics for the talk, but this was the interesting bit. I’ll have to go dig out an exact quote, or you can find it in his talk, but his idea is that people’s primary motivation for using the Web (or likely doing much of anything) is discovery. In particular, discovery of self.

As I’m learning now from an identity woman , “identity [self] is and has always been socially constructed” (which reminds me of the book “The Social Construction of Reality”). Web2.0 is enabling this social construction to happen online. So what.

Communities in reality operate based on trust. {If||when||already are} online communities are to really succeed, we need mechanisms for establishing trust. Stowe points out that this is already sort of achieved via things like linkbacks to blogs. Clearly there are lots of ways to approach this, but there is one crucial thing that they are all (as far as I can tell) dependent on – unique identification.

Trust is built on past experiences. To link multiple experiences together, you need something unique, like a face or (), to associate with those experiences. Now, trust can be associated with a person/ online agent within the context of a particular social application. I can estimate how much I might believe what bgood @ linked_in has to say based on his network and how well it might overlap with my own, but so far it is quite challenging to carry this reputation, this identity across into something new – say a new account like benjamgo on some new web2.0 application like blogger.com.

This is, of course, a standard data integration issue that is solvable in principle via unique identification. Here is where ‘user-centric identification’ (e.g. OpenId) comes to play. Forget that database of logins and passwords you keep, the day is approaching where you will only need one. Because of this, it will be easy to bring your social network, your contacts, beliefs, actions, your ‘self’ with you wherever you go.

Cool right?

I think mostly yes, but there are things to think about carefully.

We are talking about the potential end of anonymity on the Internet - and eventually everywhere else.

Is this good? Bad? Why? How?