[Note: making a private thread public.]

we could create art projects out of this multi-sensory tagging

[Note: making a private thread public.]

I want to be able to have things appear on the frequency required to program them into memory without having to sit-down and rote memorize them. Also need to consider doing this for advertising - a system that can identify the concepts on a page/site that can then match the right advertiser is cool - but to do it across sites, using the same relevant ad to get more eyeballs and get it in the users memory quicker would be very cool.

[Note: making a private thread public.]

I want to be able to tag things by virtual representations of sensory inputs: colors, textures, sounds, tastes, smells, emotions. Need to be able to do on mobile as well to incorporate real-world experiences and tag them this way at the time of their happening to capture the full essence/context.

Would also be cool to add things like the lat/long (GPS data), weather-data for where/when a pic was taken.

Could be neat to add info on "what's playing" to a tagged item. (Shazam? Verizon or Blackberry song ID tools?)

[NB: I originally started this post here on my personal site, but ended up publishing it to my work blog over at Synaptica Central. I wanted to keep a copy though.]

...There seems to be some discussion about whether or not data is a commodity. I think there IS most definitely data that are a commodity.

Taxonomies are a valuable raw material in the management of information. A file that can be bought and sold and used to improve services. They can be generated by humans, machines, or even better: humans working with machines. Many taxonomies are a dime a dozen, with little to differentiate between versions of the same data. Some are like Kopi Luwak coffee - rare and extremely valuable. The word "taxonomy" is itself suffering from a kind of genericide. Classical definitions still apply: taxonomies have become commoditized.

The complexity of the controlled vocabulary will determine its value to a degree. A simple pick list should be easy and cheap to acquire - a list of countries, for example. Or colors, seasons, months - you get the idea. What is the value of a list of industries? Or companies? Maintenance is the primary cost factor - frequent changes require frequent updates, but an authority file in and of itself is not that complex. A broad and deep poly-hierarchical taxonomy I would expect to have more value. A poly-hierarchical taxonomy is one where a term in the taxonomy can have more than one parent term. Managing these relationships takes more time. An ontology - well, those aren't quite commodities yet, but they will get there. Why? Because they still require a great deal of thought and effort.

The source of the data will also help determine its value. Data from trusted sources - for whom integrity is paramount - should be valued higher. Is the data accurate? Is it maintained? Is it in a usable format? Does it have high availability? (Many quality vendors can be found at TaxonomyWarehouse.com.)

The uniqueness of the taxonomy will drive its value. Like our coffee example above, a taxonomy as ubiquitous as Starbucks will not be as valuable as say a pharmaceutical research vocabulary. Given the, uh, processes needed to produce Kopi Luwak, it is rare and therefore fetches a higher price, as would our R&D taxonomy.

The information security concerns also impact value. Our pharmaceutical company, or a financial services provider, is not about to release it's vocabulary into the wild. It is a significant intellectual asset that merits a substantial IT effort to protect.

I actually like the fact that taxonomies have become commoditized. Why? Competition drives improvement - in quality, in focus, in security and in usability. These are areas that the semantic web community needs to focus on - in my experience, security and usability need attention NOW. Good fences make good neighbors, and when we've got good fences, we can make more links and learn to trust. Icing on the cake!

Flickr image by INeedCoffee

You'll find only a little of that here. This is my personal site, a place to try things out, practice, find my voice. If you're interested in my professional activities, check out my blog at Synaptica Central. Enjoy!

:)
Christine

Last weekend I flew cross country to L.A. for a conference at the Hyatt. I got tired of listening to the same old songs on my iPod, so started browsing. I found songs I didn't know I had - songs I think I should be embarrassed to admit that I own! ;)

OK, so this one came from a typo. I'm aggravated that different attempts to have my geographically distributed team keep up with each other have not produced the desired results. Basically, Sharepoint SUCKS. I've been trying to think of ways to automagically capture what they're doing - I don't want to create a new reporting burden, but I need to know what's going on. I think the memory palace platform idea is one way; Nova's long term vision for Twine might be another - but I think he leaked and launched too soon.

I am trying to find a small, simple bow and arrow for Morgan - like the one described in "Dangerous Book for Boys"- but ready made. (Not sure why we're not making it ourselves, but that's a different problem...)

I was checking out the site for Neologism, a very cool new plugin for Drupal that is still in Alpha. Neologism is an editor for RDF Schema and makes it ridiculously simple to create and publish vocabularies for the Semantic Web. One of the best features, in my mind, is the graph view. Being a visual learner myself, I think it will help people to understand what they are modeling, especially for those new to the ideas of inverse properties, disjoint classes, domains and ranges.