March 9, 2007
Gather ye metadata while ye can – via Fuzzzy and Freebase
Fuzzzy.com from Roy Lachica at the University of Oslo is a “web2.0 organic collaborative ontology socio-semantic polyscopic web research project.” Got it!
But seriously, it lets you tag bookmarks and maintain a social network. The big words come in because Fuzzzy lets you position a tag in an ontology. Here’s how the About page explains it:
When bookmarks are assigned a meaning using a standard like the ISO 13250 Topic Map then people as well as other computer systems can make use of the embedded knowledge in a more meaningful way. This way of categorising content is a middle way between the top-down monolithic taxonomy approach like the Yahoo directory and the more recent social tagging (folksonomy) approaches.
I’m interested to see how this experiment works out. There’s no question that the metadata it collects — in addition to classifying the resource according to a taxonomy, the site lets you check some boxes to indicate the resource’s “mood,” knowledge type, and details level — would be useful, but experience teaches us — until it confounds all teachings — that people generally resist attaching explicit metadata.
There are exceptions, and Metaweb‘s freebase may well turn out to be one. Because it’s an invitation-only beta, the best place to learn about it is Tim O’Reilly’s post about it. Paradoxically, because freebase is about metadata, users may pitch in to build it. It’s sucked in a bunch of the openly available sources of information, including Wikipedia and musicbrainz , and it has a user-extensible (via a wiki) set of metadata fields for the various types of entities in the world — so an entry for a business has a “headquarters” field but an entry for a CD does not.
Why would anyone fill in these fields? Because there’s probably one “anyone” interested enough to do so for each of the listings. Tim O’Reilly, for example, might be interested enough to fill in the form for O’Reilly Media. It only takes one person. This is the other side of networked, distributed projects: Not only can lots of people do tasks together that would be too big for any individual, but a single person can sometimes do a task for the entire group. If only 2% of the world tagged, 98% of the world’s stuff would be tagged eventually. (I totally made up those figures.)
Freebase will be fascinating to watch. If we do in fact build it, we’ll have a publicly accessible (Creative Commons licensed) ontology populated with tons of stuff we care about that will do much of what the Semantic Web is trying to do: Draw implicit connections, discover context, search better, and just in general be smarter users of a smarter Web. [Tags: tags tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy metadata fuzzzy tim_oreilly freebase metaweb ]
