Miscellanoeus - Thursday, July 3, 2008 4:02 - 0 Comments

semantic tagging

capturing recent talks with Ulrike…

semantic tagging enables the machine to extract information from plain text. the user has the ability to put meta-information into the content (in a machine readable form). in the middle of an article talking about a particular james bond movie for example… the text “Roger Moore” would be tagged something like this:

[[Actor::Roger Moore]]

in a global “dictionary” rules are then set… e.g. a rule that says “Actor is subClass of Person” and so on… this way a system of (typed) “links” emerges that can answer questions in a flexible way (“Give me all actors…” etc). beeing compliant with the semantic web this “semantic graph” evolves over time and is based on the standards RDF and SPARQL.

the “miscellaneous problem” is approached by letting things stay open … its up to the community to (implicitly) agree on categories (or “sameAs” rules to align categories/classes .. e.g. “Actor sameAs Performer”).

it will be quite fascinating when semantic tagging is ubiquitous and the information and knowledge within the bloggospheres and wikis will become more accessible and composable…
some links:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2006/12/13/semantic-wikis-and-disaster-relief-operations.html
http://www2006.org/programme/files/pdf/4039.pdf
http://semantic-mediawiki.org