0A small group of the faculty and instructional technology staff have been thinking hard about how to reinvent -- or at least re-present -- the intellectual life of students and faculty on campus. Martha Burtis has started the discussion here.

0DBpedia recently added a search facility that beautifully shows off the power of structured searching--treating content on the web as a database, rather than as a big pile of documents.

0Google-like, you have a simple, one-input interface to start your search over the DBpedia set of data, Wikipedia, put into the nice structure of RDF (i.e., semantic web). Un-Google-like, the results pull up an image for the hits if one exists (a very nice touch!). And, even better, you get a tag cloud at the top that you can use to filter the results. So, for example, type in "education" and you get a tag cloud that includes such filters as "academic degree," "professional association, "civil right," "government department," and many more. Click the filters to narrow down your search.

0As is to be expected, there are plenty of unexpected tags in the cloud. The tag "party" in the same search, for example (it leads to "Liberia Education and Development Party"). Or "album," leading to a number of albums with the word "education" in the title. That will be both a strength and weakness, depending on the user. To people with a strong training in traditional library searches (lots of booleans and classification systems), it could be a little disconcerting. But, if you put that aside, it provides a way into the data that is more intuitive in some ways. Say, for example, I heard a really great song, but the only thing I remember about it is one word from the title of the album. . .

0An overview and vision of the semantic web structured web came up this morning. I'm striking semantic web in favor of structured web because 1) I think it more precisely and accurately describes what we now have--the post uses "structured" just as much or more than "semantic" and 2) the S-web could probably make greater in-roads with a name change. There's just too much baggage and misconception focused on "semantic web" that's holding back adoption. The post either implicitly or explicitly debunks some of those misconceptions.

0Here's where they suggest things are going:

0 I suspect this new era of the structured Web also signals other transitions and changes. Practitioners and the researchers who have long labored in the laboratories of the semantic Web need to get used to business types, marketers and promoters, and (even) the general public crowding into the room and jostling the elbows. Explication, documentation and popularization will become more important; artists and designers need to join the party. While we’ve only seen it in limited measure to date, venture interest and money will also begin flooding into the room, changing the dynamics and the future in unforeseeable ways. I suspect many who have worked the hardest to bring about this exciting era may look back ruefully and wonder why they ever despaired that the broader world didn’t “get it” and why it was taking so long for the self-evident truth of the semantic Web to become real. It now is.

0I want to add one more essential group who will, or should, be interested: educators. Much of my enthusiasm for the structured web comes from the same source of my enthusiasm for writing with XML: STRUCTURE, and the ability to recombine and represent information/data/knowledge that that structure fosters. Structure is good. Structure does not "lock-in" or "deaden" knowledge, any more than than the structure produced by printing (the book) did -- it put knowledge in a structure that makes it more versatile, shareable, (re)combinable, alleable. Structured knowledge on the web continues on that same tradition. That's what we do in schools.

0Coming up all too soon, Jim Groom and I will be giving a talk on social tagging and the semantic web, and that's been my prod into playing with using the two together, and to finally get around to learning to use the SPARQL query language for the semantic web.

0As lots of classes and groups are taking off with blogging, we're starting to address something that I hinted at in my last post, the possibilities for sparking more intellectual interaction between the classes that have overlapping topics. One is Talkdigger, the subject of my last post. But deeper down is one of the ontologies Talkdigger depends on, the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) project.

0The idea is pretty simple--gee, we have all these wonderful online communities within blogs, community sites, discussion boards, etc. Wouldn't it be neat if the Drupal-powered ones could share information with the Wordpress-powered ones? Plugins let that happen by exporting the relevant info and making it available on the Semantic Web, ready for something like Talkdigger or another applicatoin to pick up and bring together. Or, just for it to be in a repository ready to get sparqled by another app. Voila and ta-daa! Youv've got the connections between those communities!

0The Drupal SIOC module is here, and the Wordpress plugin is here.

0SIOC includes properties (roughly the same as fields) for things like membership in a forum, roles within a forum, avatars used, and of course information about replies, links, and relations. The full technical spec is here.