Common Tag Brings Standards to Metadata
Let's suppose you uploaded some pictures of a trip to New York City to an online account. Do you tag them "New York City," "NYC," "newyork," or all of the above? How do you know your content will be correctly identified and related to other content on the web? And if you come across the tag "Tesla," how do you know whether it refers to the scientist, the car company, or the band?
Common Tag is a new tagging format that creates references to concretely defined concepts with their own metadata and URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can simply topic hubs, cross-promote content, and enrich pages with data, images, and widgets.
Currently, companies involved include AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo!, Zemanta, and Zigtag.
According to the Common Tag website, "The Common Tag format was developed to address the current shortcomings of tagging and help everyone - including end users, publishers, and developers - get more out of Web content. With Common Tag, content is tagged with unique, well-defined concepts - everything about New York City is tagged with one concept for New York City and everything about jaguar the animal is tagged with one concept for jaguar the animal. Common Tag also provides access to useful metadata that defines each concept and describes how the concepts relate to one another. For example, metadata for the Barack Obama Common Tag indicates that he's the President of the United States and that he's married to Michelle Obama."
The project aims to help make content as discoverable and connected as could reasonably be assumed. The creators also hope to make content more engaging. When a web app can determine what a piece of content is actually about, the UX improves exponentially. The website gives the example of a developer creating an app that uses an article about the most recent Star Trek movie and lets users purchase tickets on the same page. The site reads, "Since both the publisher and ticket service use Common Tag, the application is able to easily make the connection without having to guess at what the content of the two services is about."
Tags are expressed using RDFa, a standard format for defining data in HTML. Relevant code can be found in the Common Tag Quick Start Guide. Interested parties can learn more in the Yahoo! Common Tag group.
According to a Q&A with partner company Zemanta, CTO, Andraz Tori, said the idea for Common Tags "started in informal discussion with Peter Mika from Yahoo! and research about what would be the easiest way to let publishers get more out of their content by semantically marking it up." We've seen Common Tag as a vehicle to make Web content more discoverable, connected, and engaging.
"We then learned on previous efforts and decided that we need a full-blown ecosystem from day one. Not just academic support, but web industry support. As you can see the idea was well received."
In terms of adoption, Tori stated, "This is the first time that this number of web companies have stepped together from day one to introduce a tagging standard. We tried to build on previous academic efforts. Over that we added business incentive to participate."
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Bravo -- this is a pragmatic step forward for the semantic web.
I've been noticing a lot of stuff lately that's focused on this concept of "there's got to be a better way to find stuff on the internet"
I have a feeling that search is going to go through a radical change very soon.
This is a potentially a huge step forward in the evolution of the semantic web.
What bugs me is that anything tagged in this method won't validate XHTML Strict.
this is interesting stuff. even more so because i owned the domain commontag.com until recently (let is expire). i had similar vision. just never got around to articulating it with such depth. good stuff.
Isn't this an instance of "Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss?" In other words, one of the promises made by many regarding Web 2.0 was that it was user-generated, rather than hierarchical. Isn't this just replacing old hierarchies (professional taxonomies) with new ones (the taxonomy according to Common Tag)?
Is this similar to the tagging required for Google Rich Snippets?
thanks
Jaan can you post a URL to this google rich snippets stuff? I haven't been able to find any refs...
Anyways I am with Rob -- been there, tried that. Who is to say that we need a hierarchy and authority for what it all means? And who appointed Common Tag to be that authority?
I'm not willing to delegate that much power to one entity, sorry.
I think there's some misunderstanding - Common Tag is just a format for specifying semantically rich tags. There's no "central authority". It is an HTML extension that makes it easier for your content to be indexed and categorized.
I work for Freebase, which is one potential repository of tag identifiers, but any set of tag identifiers can be used. The Freebase dataset is user-editable and CC-by licensed, which makes it an appealing repository, but other repositories such as DBpedia (which is based on Wikipedia) also can be used.
The goal of semantic standards like Common Tag is to allow better decentralized interoperability between many different kinds of companies, services, and individuals. This is not a monolithic, top-down model.
The Freebase dataset is user-editable and CC-by licensed, which makes it an appealing repository, but other repositories such as DBpedia (which is based on Wikipedia) also can be used.
Thing is, it'll only work if the users don't have to get out of their way and do more research work AFTER they finished their article.
Maybe a Wordpress plug-in that suggests 'correct' tags while you type. But other than that I don't see it catching on.
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Frank:
Well Zemanta is such a wordpress plug-in ... it already inserts Common Tags... while you type, for example on Movable Type or TypePad platforms :)
Wordpress can't be done since it currently strips out RDFa markup... maybe they'll fix it soon.
bye
andraz
I too like this idea, but I can't seem to find information about this making this pass Strict-XHTML standard tests ?
Mikael:
It's XHTML + RDFa:
compliant, formal W3C specification... :)
bye
Andraz Tori, Zemanta
This is great, but certainly isn't the only player in the field. Check out ThomsonReuters' OpenCalais (http://www.opencalais.com) and the Calais Modules for Drupal (http://drupal.org/project/opencalais).
This is a great move forward!
Semantic patterns are great to realise the Semantic Web, however the idea is not new. Main issues are their viability. In other words: what are the tools that enact the community to evolve and agree on these patterns ?
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