A real wow-project has gone into ver­sion 2: Exhibit. It is part of SIMILE, focussing on “Seman­tic Inter­op­er­abil­ity of Meta­data and Infor­ma­tion in unLike Envi­ron­ments”, which pro­vides a whole tool­box of prag­matic seman­tic web applications.

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I just came across free­base again, and I have to say this thing looks really pros­per­ing. Free­base is sort of a meta­data / seman­tic web wiki, struc­tured around top­ics, types and domains. Essen­tially, it lets users add descrip­tions of enti­ties, such as movies, per­sons, build­ings and relate them to each other. The set of prop­er­ties used, of course, depends on the type of an entity. The project reuses a lot of Wikipedia or other free infor­ma­tion, but the inter­est­ing thing is the struc­tured approach and, for devel­op­ers, espe­cially the really pow­er­ful API with a very inter­est­ing query lan­guage approach based on JSON. Mashup time! :)

To get started, browse free­base, e.g. about, say, archi­tec­ture!

A very nice paper on the “laissez-faire librar­i­an­ship” often asso­ci­ated with tag­ging vs. more struc­tured seman­tic web approaches. Most notable is that the dis­cus­sion is put in the con­text of Husserl’s the­ory of reflec­tions, inten­tion­al­ity and intersubjectivity.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SEMANTIC WEB AND USER-CENTERED TAGGING SYSTEMS

D. Grant Camp­bell Fac­ulty of Infor­ma­tion and Media Stud­ies Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Ontario
Lon­don, Ontario N6A 5B7, Canada

Abstract This paper uses Husserl’s the­ory of phe­nom­e­nol­ogy to pro­vide a model for the rela­tion­ship between user-centered tag­ging sys­tems, such as del.icio.us, and the more highly struc­tured sys­tems of the Seman­tic Web. Using three aspects of phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal theory—the move­ment of the mind out towards an entity and then back in an act of reflec­tion, mul­ti­plic­i­ties within unity, and the shar­ing of inten­tion­al­i­ties within a community—the dis­cus­sion sug­gests that both tag­ging sys­tems and the Seman­tic Web fos­ter an inter­sub­jec­tive domain for the shar­ing and use of infor­ma­tion resources. The Seman­tic Web, how­ever, resem­bles tra­di­tional library sys­tems, in that it relies for this inter­sub­jec­tive domain on the con­scious imple­men­ta­tion of domain-centered stan­dards which are then encoded for machine pro­cess­ing, while tag­ging sys­tems work on implied prin­ci­ples of emergence.