Tagging Free For All

What if anyone could assign tags to photos in Flickr? Also, what if they can already and I just can't find that feature? :)

How much of the metadata free-for-all would be "good" metadata? Where good is defined as useful. Is there such a thing as useless metadata? I argue there isn't, as long as you know the context. For instance, if you know who (as in, FOAF) assigned the metadata (using the word tag from now on) then it doesn't matter what the tag is. The whole point of the semantic web is to allow anyone to say anything about anything. Trust networks emerge, either implicit through certain algorithms, or explicit through group memberships. These trust networks allow weights to be associated to tags. Therefore, the same tag can be both useful and useless to different people.

Due to the use of URIs, external systems can be built to created these Tag free-for-alls. Flickr is very close to allowing URIs and RDF graphs between the page about the photo and the photo itself. Once that happens, and they start exposing the tags in the RDF about the photo, we are in a position to build the tag free-for-all.

The cost of generating metadata is very high. By distributing the workload across everyone who views the image, much much more metadata is generated.

I think the minimum step would be for Flickr to publish some RDF for the photo image itself, from the photo's homepage. Once that is done, these external systems can be built.

Popular posts from this blog

Lists and arrays in Dart

(This is Part 3 in a series about Dart. Check out Part 2, Function in Dart .) Warning : We expect the Dart libraries to undergo potentially sweeping changes before Dart goes to alpha. This document is relevant as of 2011-12-22. Intro Dart is a "batteries included" effort to help app developers build modern web apps. An important "battery" is the bundled core Dart libraries, providing common and rich functionality. Dart is building a solution for large, complex web apps, and providing well tested, integrated, and common libraries is key to helping a web app developer be more productive out of the box. The Collection libraries are a crucial set of APIs that Dart developers get for free. Much more than simple arrays and maps, the Collection library includes standard ways to filter, iterate, inspect, compose, and sort your data. This post specifically looks at List<E> , Dart's ordered, indexable collection of objects. Aside: The Dart project is lucky
Read more

The 29 Healthiest Foods on the Planet

The 29 Healthiest Foods on the Planet > The following is a "healthy food hot list" consisting of the 29 food that will give you the biggest nutritional bang for you caloric buck, as well as decrease your risk for deadly illnesses like cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Read more

Converting Array to List in Scala

Now, this has to have a built-in somewhere in Scala , because it just seems too common. So, how to convert an Array to a List in Scala? Why do I need this? I needed to drop to Java for some functionality, which in this case returns an Array. I wanted to get that Array into a List to practice my functional programming skillz. **Update**: I figured out how to convert Arrays to Lists the Scala way. Turns out it's a piece of cake. val myList = List.fromArray(Array("one", "two", "three")) or val myList = Array("one","two","three").elements.toList The call to elements returns an Iterator , and from there you can convert to a List via toList . Nice. Because my first version wasn't actually tail recursive, what follows is a true tail recursive solution, if I were to implement this by hand. The above, built in mechanism is much better, though. object ArrayUtil { def toList[a](array: Array[a]): List[a] = { d
Read more