Relevant resources; Semantic Web & Metadata

The Semantic Web consists largely of documents for humans to read to one that included data and information for computers to manipulate. The Semantic Web is a Web of action-able information—information derived from data through a semantic theory for interpreting the symbols. The semantic theory provides an account of “meaning” in which the logical connection of terms establishes interoperability between systems.

Metadata is "data about data", of any sort in any media. An item of metadata may describe an individual (content) item, or a collection of data including multiple content items. For Peers, metada is central in storing and creating relations between objects. These objects can be a person, group of persons, an article/other single resource, or group of resources. Examples of metadata (or meta-information) can be the quality of a resource, the number of visitors of a blog, the number of recommendations a person has, the taste or likings of a person, and much more (any type of information). Within peers, metadata is generated in two ways: automatically, in the sense that data is collected about the content of an item (or groups of items) and usage data, and socially generated metadata, in the sense that people create metadata about content items, such as tagging, rating, recommending, commenting, and more.

Semantic Web is a term coined byTim Berners-Lee, the creator of the first Internet browser. In this article he introduces the concept, the basics of RDF (Resource Description Framework: semantics of web-resources), explains the current developments, and where we are or should be heading. The original Scientific American article from 2001 also explains a thing or two about the semantic web.

Nova Spivack in an illustrated blogpost describes the future of the web (until Web 4.0!). In another blogpost he treats productivity, the role of keywords, natural language, and artificial intelligence. Here he elaborates more on Web 3.0, and how this new web is already occurring.

Adam Mathes introduces the concept of tagging and folksonomies in this article. Interesting article about tagging and folksonomies by Golder and Huberman, two scientists working at HP Labs. This article describes the Renaissance of Manual Indexing of online resources through tagging and folksonomies.

Stephen Downes describes the need for resource profiles, outlines their major conceptual properties, describes different types of constituent metadata, and examines the use of resource profiles in practice in a somewhat more difficult to understand paper. Resource profiles are constituted of metadata that are distributed in different, open and closed systems.