Ben,
Thanks for the response. I'll comment below:
On Apr 28, 2007, at 8:54 AM, Robert Parks wrote:
I'd like to raise a question about the development of the Semantic
Bank via Piggy Bank. Its a fairly theoretical question, and I'm not
sure I'm hitting the right nail, much less that I'm hitting the head.
If I'm getting it right, I'd like to offer some assistance. Here's
the issue.
:)
All of the new tagging sites save tags on the server.
Right, their are both engineering, social, and business reasons why they
are all storing it on the server side
Piggy Bank/Semantic Bank are superior in the data they allow one to
save. One advantage of saving tags on a server is that one can share
and compare tags and URLs with others. Each of these groups provides
some (limited) facilities to manage the groups one shares tags with.
But this approach misses out on the opportunities that would come
with a centralized store of tagging information. I'd like to
consolidate the tagging information I have accumulated in different
repositories, both the actual URLs that are tagged, and the semantics
of the tags I have accumulated.
That tension between the social and personal data pools (and their
semantics) is one of the cool things that PiggyBank toys with.
> Would it be possible to consolidate tagging information from multiple
sources?
Absolutely, all it takes is scrapers for the individual sites from
whence you wish to draw your data.
> If so, then the next step I'd propose is to use a personal
dictionary-thesaurus to manage a users' personal semantics.
Interesting. Tags are pairs: <thing>/<tag>. RDF is triples <item>/
<verb>/<object>.
I attended a light talk by Marti Hearst recently where she outlined a
technique to
map the pairs into the triples using wordnet's thesaurus. So if you
had <ibm>/<blue>
you might map it into <ibm>/<color>/<blue>. Which of course would
help us, since
we need triples for the facet's browsing. She does too. That paper
"Automating
Creation of Hierarchical Faceted Metadata Structures" and others, is
here: <http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/pubs.html>. I don't believe the
system outlined
there is live on the web though.
Any reactions?
In passing I'll note that delicious has tag bundles, which are
analogous providing
the user with taxonomic.
If PiggyBank allowed me to consolidate my tags from other tagging
tools/sites, it would be a good repository for thesaurus semantics.
WordNet has some semantic relations, but what's needed is a framework
for the user to construct their own thesaurus and designate their own
semantic relations. The loosly structured "bundles" in del.iciu.us
are a start. I'd call them "clusters" of associated terms, while the
2 semantic relations marked in WordNet (and extracted by Marti Hearst
for use in facet development) are more precisely defined "concepts".
WordNet has "part/whole" and "taxonomy/kind of" relations. In my
children's dictionary-thesaurus I have a large number of relations
marked for some key words:
For example, "airplane" has these relations marked:
* broader categories that include airplanes: aircraft transportation vehicle
* group of airplanes: fleet
* related to airplanes: glider helicopter
* some actions of airplanes: ascend climb coast descend fly
glide land pitch roll thrust turn
* some activities associated with airplanes: board eject parachute
sky dive travel
* some examples of airplanes: airliner bomber jet liner seaplane
shuttle transport
* some kinds of airplanes: commercial private
* some parts of airplanes: cabin coach cockpit compartment
control fin flap fuselage gear instrument jet engine nose
porthole propellor rudder tail tire wheel wing
* some people associated with airplanes: aviator captain crew
engineer flight attendant mechanic navigator pilot
* some places for airplanes: airport hangar ramp runway sky terminal
* some things associated with airplanes: airline flight propulsion
radar sonar touchdown wingspan
* some things typically transported by airplanes: cargo freight
luggage mail passengers soldiers
If anyone is interested, I can seed the project with this "Word
Explorer" data from the Wordsmyth Children's Dictionary.
Bob
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