Tagontology

TagOntology
Tom Gruber Co-Founder and CTO, RealTravel tomgruber.org

“Let’s share tags.”
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What would we actually share?
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stuff that only people can read, one by one data that makesfor pretty graphs and clouds information that has value when shared increase the population of contributors create cross-links and multiple perspectives enable new computational riffs

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How dowe create value by sharing?
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Levels of agreement on technical infrastructure -> value enabled
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Formats: Data can be accessed Schema: Data can be queried and stored Ontology: Datacan be interpreted, aggregated, composed Application/service: Data and functionality can be shared (requires a monopoly)

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Semantic agreement enables constructive composition

compositionnoise?

Example: formal match, semantic mismatch
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System A says a tag is a property of a document. System B says a tag is an assertion by an individual with an identity. Does it meananything to combine the tag data from these two systems?
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“Precision without accuracy” “Statistical fantasy”

Semantic agreement enables useful composition
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Systems A, B, C, & D agree that atagging is an assertion tagged(term,item,agent)
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they also must agree on details such as how to determine equality of terms, items, and agents

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System B, C, & D agree, in addition,that the assertions include polarity (+ or -) All systems can count up tags on an item Systems B & C can merge voting data System D (anti-spam) knows more about agents. It can riff on B’s and C’s datato give some agents more weight, and it can make inferences about agent validity.

Ontology is a mechanism for making semantic agreement
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Independent of data model, format, application Can bestated in many equivalent forms
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Languages like OWL Semantic Web has tools for translation, validation, and serialization into XML formats only hard requirement is logical consistency

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