Social bookmark tools are rapidly emerging on the Web. In such systems users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies. The reason for their immediate success is the fact that no specific skills are needed for participating. At
Recent Developments on the Internet: The common characteristic, which all these systems share, is that the approach is "bottom-up" rather than "top-down". This means that in these environments content and structure are not determined by professional, corp
This diagram depicts a spectrum of information sharing capabilities. Moving from lower right to upper left of the diagram, we see that more expressive forms of metadata and semantic modeling encompass the simpler forms, and extend their capabilities. From
...microformats are (in Alex's words) "adding semantics to markup to take it from being machine readable to being machine understandable." So what use would microformats be in a web browser? Alex explains that microformats will make the Web Browser
This Thinking XML column shows how to combine metadata collected from multiple XML source documents into a single Resource Description Framework (RDF) model for effective querying. In this follow-up to his previous installment that introduced how to use X
The basis of RDF's strength as a knowledge-management tool is that it allows you to organize, interrelate, classify, and annotate this knowledge, thereby increasing the aggregate value of the stored data. RDF has a reputation for complexity that is belied
This column, the third in a series, shows how to add semantic knowledge to an RDF application by incorporating WordNet synonym sets. With the added knowledge of the WordNet lexical database, you can search a set of RDF data for related concepts, not just
Uche Ogbuji moves on to a discussion of a far more sophisticated RDF query language than the primitive API he has discussed thus far. This is the foundation for establishing the middleware for the Issue Tracker article in coming installments. So far, in
Much as people and economies depend on information, the exchange of data has often been hindered by the incompatible formats of proprietary hardware and software. That was less of a problem when computers rarely communicated with each other, but now it's
Repeat after me: "There is no syntax." In order to use and gain advantage from RDF, you do not have to use any particular syntax -- not even the syntax specified in the RDF 1.0 specification. Uche Ogbuji discusses the importance of XML/RDF interchange, of
This discussion of XML and semantics kicks off a column by Uche Ogbuji on knowledge management aspects of XML, including metadata, semantics, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Topic Maps, and autonomous agents. Approaching the topic from a practical p
Category search within digital repositories is poorly supported. This means that people wishing to access the assets of digital repositories are largely limited to keyword search, which means they must know what they want in order to look for it. Our part
It might seem redundant to have semantic tagging when you can basically find anything you can think of with simple searches in Google or Yahoo. But del.icio.us seems to be most surprising when you're trying to find things that relate to what you're intere
Lexical ambiguity is a fundamental problem in Information Retrieval (IR), especially in the medical domain. Many systems use a subset of the words contained in the document to represent the content, but they are faced with the problem of ambiguity.
Ever notice that before you can really do a good web search, you have to actually know something about your search topic? Let's say you want to learn more about jazz. But you don't know any of the "keywords," the musicians, the composers, the talent. S
It is important to differentiate between text data mining and information access (or information retrieval, as it is more widely known)... the goal of data mining is to discover or derive new information from data, finding patterns across datasets, and/o
Data mining (DM), also called Knowledge-Discovery in Databases (KDD) or Knowledge-Discovery and Data Mining, is the process of automatically searching large volumes of data for patterns using tools such as classification, association rule mining, clusteri