David Wiley of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (Utah State University) and OpenContent.org (blog) is visiting us today, so I’ve just been catching up on some of his recent posts.
Here’s a nice segment of a recent posting from David:
Many of us already aggregate this data via RSS and ATOM for viewing and reading. Maybe you even use one of those newfangled web 2.0 desktops to read many of your feeds in the same place. Having access to all that data in one places is, granted, more convenient than having to chase it all over the web. However, these systems generally only show you the data from a remote location. Why don’t we store all this data in one spot?
Then why don’t we provide easy access to this data as RDF? There is admittedly some work to do here for each service, but nothing insurmountable. Then you, and me, and everyone else in the world can start writing agents to make (lowercase) semantic web-like uses of this data. Sure, the semantic web supposedly runs on a high octane mix of controlled-vocabulary-ontology-taxonomy mayhem, but who says we can’t run a useful system on folksonomic data?
This is a common theme I’ve been hearing in a lot of places, and is not unlike half a dozen activities we’re starting here in KMi. I’m looking forward to interacting with David as we begin to head off on our Open Content Initiative adventures!
Hey Tony (Hirst): check this stuff out! 
[Instant update] I just re-read David’s posting and some of the followup comments, and meant to add that I’m not sure I buy the ‘Why don’t we store all this data in one spot?’ concept, which goes against the grain of how Web2.0 services are shaping up… so I’ll ask David about that when I see him!
He’s right in one sense about some of the weaknesses of ‘mere aggregation’. I’ve argued before that some aggregation tools provide a few orders of magnitude power boost, but that the effect is illusory. This is my two-orders-of-magnitude overload conjecture:
RSS aggregators give users, especially early adopters of new technologies, a two-order-of-magnitude (i.e. 100x) ‘power boost’ in dealing with the ‘knowledge flow’ whipping around us. But whenever there’s a three, four, five, or six order-of-magnitude (i.e. 1000x, 10,000x, 100,000x, or 1,000,000x) spread of ‘adopters of new technologies’, not only are such technologies not new any more, but a two-order-of-magnitude ‘power boost’ is insufficient.
But mixing and matching light and heavy markup (informal and formal; lowercase and uppercase; folksonomy and ontology; etc) is going to be a very difficult challenge. I played last year with FOAF-based photo annotation codepiction paths — now there’s a mouthful. In a nutshell it’s a way to ‘prove’, via photographic evidence, that you are N steps removed from a celebrity (say). But only if the evidence is properly tagged. I found the exercise tantalizing, but extremely frustrating, as I descirbed in “Digital identity: FOAF vs swarm intelligence” (including the obligatory example linking my photo to that of Frank Sinatra in 7 steps using Libby Miller and Dan Brickley’s toolset. We’re not very far from the capability to make this easy, and it’s informative to look at the relationship between the informal tagging world and the formal semantic markup world. But as I moaned in that article.. the proposition is about 5 years old, so I’m starting to have fresh doubts….
Technorati Tags: cosl, oci, open.content, rdf, rss, open.university, kmi, semantic, web
