Exhibit
Freebase
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!
Husserl and tagging
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.
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.