Gather ye metadata while ye can – via Fuzzzy and Freebase
March 9th, 2007 by David Weinberger
Fuzzzy.com from Roy Lachica at the University of Oslo is a “web2.0 organic collaborative ontology socio-semantic polyscopic web research project.” Got it!
But seriously, it lets you tag bookmarks and maintain a social network. The big words come in because Fuzzzy lets you position a tag in an ontology. Here’s how the About page explains it:
When bookmarks are assigned a meaning using a standard like the ISO 13250 Topic Map then people as well as other computer systems can make use of the embedded knowledge in a more meaningful way. This way of categorising content is a middle way between the top-down monolithic taxonomy approach like the Yahoo directory and the more recent social tagging (folksonomy) approaches.
I’m interested to see how this experiment works out. There’s no question that the metadata it collects — in addition to classifying the resource according to a taxonomy, the site lets you check some boxes to indicate the resource’s “mood,” knowledge type, and details level — would be useful, but experience teaches us — until it confounds all teachings — that people generally resist attaching explicit metadata.
There are exceptions, and Metaweb‘s freebase may well turn out to be one. Because it’s an invitation-only beta, the best place to learn about it is Tim O’Reilly’s post about it. Paradoxically, because freebase is about metadata, users may pitch in to build it. It’s sucked in a bunch of the openly available sources of information, including Wikipedia and musicbrainz , and it has a user-extensible (via a wiki) set of metadata fields for the various types of entities in the world — so an entry for a business has a “headquarters” field but an entry for a CD does not.
Why would anyone fill in these fields? Because there’s probably one “anyone” interested enough to do so for each of the listings. Tim O’Reilly, for example, might be interested enough to fill in the form for O’Reilly Media. It only takes one person. This is the other side of networked, distributed projects: Not only can lots of people do tasks together that would be too big for any individual, but a single person can sometimes do a task for the entire group. If only 2% of the world tagged, 98% of the world’s stuff would be tagged eventually. (I totally made up those figures.)
Freebase will be fascinating to watch. If we do in fact build it, we’ll have a publicly accessible (Creative Commons licensed) ontology populated with tons of stuff we care about that will do much of what the Semantic Web is trying to do: Draw implicit connections, discover context, search better, and just in general be smarter users of a smarter Web. [Tags: tags tagging folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy metadata fuzzzy tim_oreilly freebase metaweb ]
There’s an “f” missing in the link under Fuzzzy.com
“people generally resist attaching explicit metadata”
I’d add: people generally resist entering any data that they don’t feel a compelling need to enter.
These sites may be good examples of cases where the metadata / data distinction makes less sense. The stuff a person types into fields is always *data* (e.g., at the moment it’s being entered, it’s data), and data can be a type of content that people are interested in generating in that “user generated content” sense of things.
It could make sense to imagine a spectrum between, say, tangible uses and abstract uses of data, e.g., data that I can see as useful to me right now, on one end of the scale; vs data I am informed is going to be useful to me at some point, but for which I have absolutely no tangible sense of its uses, on the other end.
This tangible use / abstract use spectrum may match, or be able to be described in terms of the data / metadata dichotomy. But, I think we’re always going to see new applications that find ways to push metadata into the tangible use end of the scale. And, since I don’t want to sound too idealistic, I should note that I am sure we can look forward to the majority of new applications finding ways to make meta/data seem hard / abstract to use.
[…] I’m having another of parallel universe feeling. Unknown to me as I was writing my earlier post today regarding some desired evolution of tagging and collaborative directory approaches, David Wienberger also today blogged Gather ye metadata while ye can – via Fuzzzy and Freebase highlighting to new entries to the crowded tagging field. […]
[…] Lastly, I’m feeling a bit foolish about yesterday being so quick to point to David Weinberger’s post versus doing my own research first. Alas, at the end of what felt like a very long work week, I fell into the lazy blogger behavior of pointing to somebody who is pointing to somebody who is pointing to somebody. Hopefully I have received at least some redemption with the above evidence of starting to do my real homwork. […]
Jay, you’re right about the distinction between data and metadata. It’s often debatable, and I use the term too broadly.
WRT freebase, as is so often the case, its success will probably depend on the unpredictable social dynamics.
[…] Everything is Miscellaneous » Blog Archive » Gather ye metadata while ye can – via Fuzzzy and Freebase “Freebase will be fascinating to watch. If we do in fact build it, we’ll have a publicly accessible (Creative Commons licensed) ontology populated with tons of stuff we care about that will do much of what the Semantic Web is trying to do: Draw implicit c (tags: joho freebase metadata social tags fuzzy ontology oreill topic topicmap map) […]