Fantastic and exciting developments in one of my favorite worlds, that of rdf and the semantic web! I haven't had a chance to surf around and read material for a while, so there's too much for one blog post and I'll get to them all eventually. The big ones to know about are version 3 of Piggybank, the SIOC ontology (where was I that I missed this coming up?!?), and Talkdigger.

Talkdigger makes a nice move in describing itself as "Semantic Web Ready." It's an apt description, I think, in pointing up the new ways of envisioning the relationships between content on the web that the semantic web will bring while tacitly acknowledging that it's not in the air yet. But with Talkdigger, we're getting to liftoff velocity.

Talkdigger lets users pick out a conversation taking place on the web by focusing on a URL that's a node in that conversation. It then searches around, both in a general web search and within other conversations already in the system, for other nodes in the conversation and starts putting together the relationships between them. In that way it is similar to co-comment (I confess I haven't used co-comment, though, so I hope someone who has will help make the comparison). It uses the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) ontology to produce the connections. The result is a way to make connections between online conversations and the people producing them.

I started by tracking a conversation that I was confident would be interesting and provocative, one from my old friend and partner in Instructional Technology Gardner Campbell, and then also tracks for my fellow Instruction Technology Specialists here at UMW, Jerry Slezak, Andy Rush, Martha Burtis, and Jim Groom, as well as a handful of other instructional tech. blogs. Here's a little of what happened:

Taking Gardner's blog as the conversation, Talkdigger looks for the other conversations pointing into his blog, and for the conversations pointed to from his blog. Each can then be clicked on to get more--a preview (in a sharp viewport), check to see if links to it are part of other conversations being tracked, and more.

Best of all, I think, is the FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) info that is included when looking at a conversation being tracked by another user. Here's what you'll see if you look at a conversation that I'm also tracking:

More about Talkdigger's creator and creation can be found here.

The greatest fun for me so far has been clicking along some of the related conversations, especially ones I was already familiar with, and discovering connections that I hadn't know. I know many similar functionalities are available in other services, but I don't think I've seen all of them come together this way.

For teaching, this looks extraordinarily useful: it could facilitate students tracking each others' course-related blogs and start seeing the interconnections. That would be especially fantastic if/when more than one class has students blog and use this service. This could expose connections between many courses far better than RSS feeds could, and that would hit at one of the most important goals of a liberal arts education--finding the relationships between all of the material across courses and disciplines.