A 'directory' for UMWBlogs has been cooking conceptually for some time, and has now started cooking into code. The first thing I'm working on is grabbing data from feeds and turning into RDF. I have a test/demo of the first draft of the system here.

Alexandre 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).

A bit ago I blogged about the tangled graph of SIOC info, collected up from the blogs of some of my colleagues.

The "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, -->

Gardner and Andy have started a movement for New Year's Resolutions about blogging more. I'm not sure I can realistically promise to blog more, but I'll try.

More 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:

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

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.

Calling 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!

Jim Groom and I did a talk this week for ACCS on tagging and the semantic structured web. The upshot is looking into ways to use the structure and searching power of RDF to create new ways to make use of tagging. Here, it's looking at tags on blogs.

Below are a few examples of RSS feeds, plus a link to a SIMILE Exhibit, that demonstrate some of the possibilities. Instead of feeding out syndicated content, they're feeding out remixes of data coming in from RSS feeds (a lot like Yahoo Pipes, but when we get to the last example the differences will be clear). The RDF graph at the heart of it is based on a snapshot of the feeds from about 10 people, with some SIOC data added on top. It's all done with the help of RAP. I was getting some unexpected results here and there from RAP's feed parser (Magpie), so I sent the feeds through Dave Beckett's Triplr.

It'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.

Pondering 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.")

Makes 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?

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

Exciting stuff as tagging meets libraries.

Some thinking richer than mine about serendipity (aka 'alchemy') from some folks deeper in the world of libraries. Many thanks to kurastan90 on de.licio.us for sending them my way.

http://idlethink.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/the-perils-of-the-keyword/

http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=344

DBpedia'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

Searching 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.

The 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

Browsing 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.