I totally love your ideas. It will be awesome to see what we can do
once our genealogy is tagged with metadata and available through API's.
On a similar note, I have been thinking how nice it would be to have
a tagging system like del.icio.us for rating website content -- from
"true, accurate, uplifting" to "disingenuous, misleading,
pornographic." And one might build a Firefox extension/toolbar that
would check the rating before showing the website (if it's available)
and not display sites below the user's desired threshold. If I
happen to find a pornographic or obscene site, I can tag it and save
everyone else the trouble of ever finding it.
On a separate note, a Firefox extension could also filter obscene
language from web pages.
Richard
Sorry to respond to my own post, but my ideas are flowing. Some of
you may be familiar with del.icio.us, a web-based bookmark manager.
Users can post urls and associate any number of 'tags' with these
urls. A tag is simply a single word associated with the url in
question.
Imagine then a service like del.icio.us that tied into this
hypothetical system the church could develop around its digitized
microfilm images in which users could associate any number of tags
with a particular image. Although the church through its extraction
efforts will be indexing the actual text of each image, such a
service (which wouldn't have to be developed or maintained by the
church) could allow people to add useful metadata to each image.
Essentialy a folksonomy[1] centered around the digitized images.
Taking this a step further, one could build a service around this
hypothetical API such that users could create RDF "semantic-web"[2]
data associated with each image, such as "John Doe was born in
Sussex, England in 1815", which would then be machine-readable, and
much in the same way proofs can be deduced in a relational database
based on the basic information stored in relations. Imagine being
able to query "show me all images for a John Doe born in Sussex,
England within 5 years of 1815".
The same "semantic annotation" (via RDF) could be done for family
tree information as well.
It's my firm belief that there are applications that will surface
which we can't even imagine at this time that will be possible with
open APIs such as
these.
Just some (more) thoughts.
-- Dan
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