0Alexandre Passant continues to do wonderful things, this time with the MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) project. He's extended Richard Newman's excellent Tagging ontology so that it expresses (possible) meanings of tags in a semantic web-friendly way (i.e., using a URI).

0The "3 Tags Rule" in my previous post was mostly inspired by some things Jim Hendler's Reinventing Academic Publishing – Part III and in an article he co-wrote with Jennifer Golbeck,

0More ways to approach the Wikipedia encyclopedia-cum-database, made possible by the good folks at DBpedia. This one comes from Patrick Tufts, who is also working on Freebase. He offers up a Wikipedia category browser, aimed at addressing questions like this:

0 a common question we ask is of the form "what are all the categories that list Wikipedia articles about people?"

0 The browser is here. Type in a keyword like "bibliography" or "myth" or "technology", etc., and get a list of relevant Wikipedia categories in one column. Then, click on those to drill down to entries (they'll appear in a middle column). Here's something fun--click on an entry, and in a third column you get the article itself, complete with [Edit] tags to dive right in to Wikipedia.

0Calling all librarians--DBpedia and projects that make use of it (not to mention broader structured web applications) are opening up multitudes of new ways to find and organize data....we're all going to have lots of fun exploring how best to use them!

0It's been a good couple weeks for surprising key words popping up in disparate places. First there was "slicing and dicing", and now "serendipitizing" makes a return over on Oook blog.

0Pondering libraries big and small, past and present, he looks to tagging as an organizational system that helps provide a "narrative structure, the tales they [books, artifacts, library-stuff] are or can be woven into." (Which pretty much explains the first sentence of this post, "surprising key words popping up in disparate places.")

0Makes me wonder--what are the similarities and differences between a traditional cataloging structure (say, Library of Congress Subject Headings) and a narrative structure for the artifacts that grows out of tagging. And, how does one move between one and the other?

0On the subject of libraries, see also a new project aimed at creating a (yet another) new and improved Bibliographic Ontology.

0Exciting stuff as tagging meets libraries.

0DBpedia's database of Wikipedia got me thinking a lot about how I go about finding information (I think all the time I've been spending with librarians lately is also influencing my brain). There are three ways. The first two are pretty common.

Searching

0Searching is when you pretty well know what you are looking for, and have some good key to get at it. For example, when I know I need to find a particular book, or a number of books by a particular author, I've got a well-defined key to get me on my way: the title or the author's name.

0The nice fields given in the library's MARC records or the particular fields for most journal searches are designed for this. RDF predicates in the Semantic Web and SPARQL queries are also good on searching, but more on that later. Searching is also sometimes a hard thing for first-year students to wrap their heads around because they've grown up in the Google world of...

Browsing

0Browsing is when you have a rough idea of the kind of thing you are looking for, so you get yourself to a likely general area (either physical or virtual) and start poking around. This, I think, is primarily what Google offers, even when you really want to do a search. That's what makes the difficulty for first-year students--searching and browsing are the same thing because research all-too-often equals "Google." That particular struggle continues.