A Frog in the Valley

The next big thing: User-contributed metadata :

(…) users are contributing a potentially far more lucrative Web currencyâ??metadata about themselves. Itâ??s the currency that will help Facebook grow into its $15 billion valuation. In addition, users are also contributing structured (meta) data about data, which will help the semantic Web to flower.

That’s a great way of expressing the link between where the web is right now and where I think it is actively going (as we blog)… For a bit more on the next step, from a recent article at Semantic Focus :

Metadata is data about data. Metadata explains typical semantics of respective concrete data items within local context. Metadata abstracts data items at the conceptual level.

In a recent post, Nova Spivack stated that hyperdata is to data what hypertext is to text. Hypertexts are texts with hyperlinks that link to other documents. Similarly, hyperdata are data with hyperlinks that link to other data.

I have been thinking a lot about hyperdata in the last week, I think I have found a way to reconcile my idealist (uppercase Semantic Web with RDF) perspective with my pragmatic (lowercase semantic web with microformats)… and it starts with people. That’s what was missing from my view of the Semantic Web, as per wikipedia :

The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily. It derives from W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

I think I need to re-read everything I read it the last 5 years about the semantic web and parse it with the people angle. It’s *so* obvious, I don't know how I missed it… it’s not only about automated software agents, it’s about human augmented data!

PS. Yes Karl, you can write “I told you so” in the comments! I must admit I had missed “RDF is for the lazy person” [source] that might have tipped me earlier. Anyhow, this is really opening up new perspectives and triggering a few other insights…

PPS. I am using “human augmented” data in the same vein as “human augmented” artificial intelligence.

[Via Between the Lines | ZDNet.com and Semantic Focus]

[tags]semanticweb,microformats,rdf,metadata,hyperdata[/tags]