Comments on: data blogs http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2005/04/12/data-blogs/ EBB is the ebiquity research group\\\'s blog at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). We focus on technologies that facilitate the design, implementation and control of distributed, intelligent information systems -- mobile and pervasive computing, ad hoc networking, multiagent systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, and the semantic web. As the tides of technology ebb and flow, we hope the good ideas wash up on our beach and the bad ones drift back out to sea. Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:29:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Richard Lowe http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2005/04/12/data-blogs/comment-page-1/#comment-244 Richard Lowe Sat, 16 Apr 2005 13:16:27 +0000 /?p=219#comment-244 A number of people have picked up on the idea of using the tagging concept of Technorati etc as a way of making semantic mark-up an easier and more natural process. When I first came across the idea of tagging and the way it was being used by Technorati, del.icio.us and Flickr it immediately struck me as the 'human' approach to mark-up for web resources. It seems I wasn't alone: my project supervisor pointed me in the direction of a blog entry at http://www.thespoke.net/BlogReader/SingleEntry.aspx?id=78637#id78637from one of the people at MIT working on the Haystack project (http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu). If you're not aware of this, then I suggest you check it out - it's still very much work in progress but shows a lot of promise for making semantic mark-up of data user-friendly. My personal viewpoint is that ontologies and folksonomies are complementary: tags have the advantage of being freeform and easy to use, whilst ontologies allow the mark-up to be reasoned about semantically. By tagging data and then grounding those tag phrases in ontological descriptions I believe you could create a happy medium where humans can easily classify data and machines can process and reason about those classifications automatically. A number of people have picked up on the idea of using the tagging concept of Technorati etc as a way of making semantic mark-up an easier and more natural process. When I first came across the idea of tagging and the way it was being used by Technorati, del.icio.us and Flickr it immediately struck me as the ‘human’ approach to mark-up for web resources.

It seems I wasn’t alone: my project supervisor pointed me in the direction of a blog entry at http://www.thespoke.net/BlogReader/SingleEntry.aspx?id=78637#id78637from one of the people at MIT working on the Haystack project (http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu). If you’re not aware of this, then I suggest you check it out – it’s still very much work in progress but shows a lot of promise for making semantic mark-up of data user-friendly.

My personal viewpoint is that ontologies and folksonomies are complementary: tags have the advantage of being freeform and easy to use, whilst ontologies allow the mark-up to be reasoned about semantically. By tagging data and then grounding those tag phrases in ontological descriptions I believe you could create a happy medium where humans can easily classify data and machines can process and reason about those classifications automatically.

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