Common Tag

Based on Common Tag specification and various APIs around, there are certainly a lot of easy next steps towards interfacing more efficiently the free tagging and linked data universe. For example it should not be too difficult to build an interface allowing the mapping of Twitter hashtags to DBpedia URIs, based on both Twitter and Zemanta APIs. Faviki could open this path.

Everything is a thing, everyone is many

So I'm now on Twitter, following a couple a people, hoping some interesting bits and pieces will float around to my shore. And well, some have. For example this interesting piece on Multiple Personas. What Silona writes there on the essential multiplicity of a person can certainly also apply to things and representations. We know more or less from inside our multiplicity and ambiguity, and the importance of keeping multiple personas revolve around our fundamental and essential emptiness. But we've lost most of the time the capacity to look at things the same way. As Jean Rousselot put it, we are not simple enough any more to "enter things as things can enter things"

Il faudrait pouvoir entrer sans frémir
Dans les choses
Comme les choses
Entrent dans les choses.

The poets are the ones able to enter things, experience their mutiplicity, and show how they appear to us as multiple personas.
We should look at the necessary convergence of the social and semantic web(s) with this paradigm of multiple personas in mind.

sameas.org

sameas.org is quite an implementation of hubjects for the linked data universe. It relies still a bit too much on owl:sameAs, but I begin to believe that owl:sameAs eventual semantics will be the one applications make of it. Only reasoners in closed universes will apply owl:sameAs for what it is in the standard (strict identity). Open Web and linked data cloud will use it as "follow-your-nose" hubs to switch from one representation to another and aggregate information.

WE are the hubs

We've spoken a lot here about identifying and linking things and data about things. But 2008 will stay as the year of linking people. Clay Shirky exposed that brilliantly in his book "Here Comes Everybody"
As hundreds of millions of people, I've engaged in a few social networks this year. Not that I was not in some on-line communities before. In 1999-2000 I was Open Directory editor, since 2001 I've been a lunatic Wikipedian. But it was not those fancy Web *.0 social networks making billions of dollars. I've never been in Facebook or MySpace or the like, never going over this a priori reluctancy to join in noisy, aimless social chatter, exchanging images, music and recipes. No thanks.
Nevertheless ... I joined LinkedIn in January 2008, mostly to update my address book. At the time there were 17,000,000 people "In". Now the figures are over 30,000,000, or so they say. At the end of 2009 it's bound to be 1% of mankind. But LinkedIn is mostly an ego-booster. The main purpose of being "In" is very selfish : look at how efficient and professional, how many people I'm connected with etc. There are groups, but they have no real social activity as far as I can tell. So I keep my LinkedIn account for what it's worth : a free human resources directory.
In spring I had a try at Twine. With good marketing, they attracted a lot of smart, brilliant people. It was an interesting experience, but mostly unfocused and time-consuming. Twine has no particular purpose beyond conversation. I was quickly fed up with that, so I left.
My favourite these days is WiserEarth. I was very impressed by the clarity of purpose, the quality of information, and the spirit of the community. Of course the numbers are still small, less than 20,000 to-date. But you're most welcome to join.

Open GUID : anchoring hubjects

Jason Borro has announced yesterday his Open GUID initiative on the Linking Open Data forum. After a first day of open discussion, it appears that he has came with the right implementation of hubjects, and moreover with a great metaphor. Hubjects must be anchored in signs, bot human-readable and computer-readable. Here is what I come with this morning.

Everything is a Sign

That is, every thing is a sign. The first and main function of any language is to allow division of the world into "this" and "not this", based on some interpretation of data received from the world. Such an interpretation of data as signs is the basic form of semiosis, a process performed for quite a while by humans, and for many more ages by animals before them. It can now be performed by machines or information systems (roughly, computers connected to data acquisition devices). The aspects of this process can be defined as following.

1. SALIENCE : Capacity to separate as meaningful (significant or salient) a certain data set from the continuous data flow we get from the world through our perceptive experience, be it direct through our biological senses, or indirect through one or more several levels of mediation : reading data gathered by instrumental devices, compilation of such data over time, texts interpreting those data.
2. SIGNIFICATION : Capacity to consider the salient data set as a signifier conveying a particular meaning (signified), based on some characteristics such as spatial connectivity, permanence in time, regularity of patterns, similarity with other data sets previously interpreted and stored as signs, or anything the interpreter sees fit by its own rules and general view of the world. The core and essential meaning assigned is generally permanence, existence of a "thing" underlying the "sign". The thing is the signified associated to the signifier which is the data set.
3. REPRESENTATION : Translate this sign/thing (both signifier and signified) into some proxy in a representation language allowing storage and retrieval for further use. Typical forms of representation include assignation of identifiers (symbols, icons, names, code numbers), description of the signified, and its connection to pre-existing ones through classification, typing, or any other kind of association or linking.
   

The above analysis can be set as the basis for a general semiosis framework applicable to natural languages (human or otherwise), formal languages used in our information systems, and scientific languages (theories in physics, biology). This framework, while keeping agnostic at the metaphysical level on the ontological status of things, will hopefully help to provide a solid theoretical foundation to the emerging semiosphere, the network of human knowledge and languages and information systems.

For use of this approch in the Semantic Web area, see a first cut ontology here. More to come.

Own your identity

ownyouridentity.com is a blog about owning your online identity in a world with an increasing amount of software that wants to own it for you. It's written by the chi.mp team and friends.