Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki's suggestions don't just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.
Faviki's backend uses DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting structured info from Wikipedia and turning that into a database which you can query. (You can read our previous coverage on DBpedia here).
This means that instead of just being words, the tags in this data model become references to objects which are categorized automatically. An example from the Faviki blog cited an example using the tag "Coca-Cola." An item you tagged with this concept would actually reference the unique URL http://dbpedia.org/data/Coca-Cola (the tag is the last part of that URL). Under other tagging systems, the same item may have been tagged with cocacola, coca-cola, coca+cola, CocaCola, but in Faviki, it's simply "Coca-Cola." And because the tags structure is already emanating from the largest collection of concepts in the world - Wikipedia - their format is already standardized and agreed upon by the community.
Despite Faviki's lofty goals, it's just as easy to use as any other bookmarking service. Once you sign up, you can install a browser bookmarklet which you can use to save links and tag them. You can also search your tags or click through the site's tag cloud to view some of the most popular saved links from the Faviki community.
A Search on Faviki
Unfortunately, there is no way to import your bookmark collection from another service. This is probably because doing so would necessitate completely re-tagging every link- that would certainly require too much effort on the part of a user if it was a manual process and I imagine it's also difficult to create a service that would automatically scan each link and tag it appropriately. However, without this option, it will be hard to get users to completely switch over from whatever service they are using now.
Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.
There has been a lot of discussion around this topic lately. At the recent Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, predicted that over the next 10-15 years, tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web, while keywords disappear.
If that turns out to be true, then Faviki represents a big step in that direction by offering a transitional service between social bookmarking and a purely semantic-based bookmarking service that would automatically know how to tag any content saved by discovering the semantic aspects already associated with that web page.
Comments
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Faviki looks like a great service - it is innovative software designs like this that make me believe the semantic web is not far away. And I think the data is out there, its a matter of searching it, not a matter of redoing the web. Though RDF would make things easier.
Posted by: zachlandes | May 26, 2008 11:55 AM
What about Adaptive Blue? I'm pretty sure that they were in the semantic tagging space first:
http://www.adaptiveblue.com/
Posted by: Baxter Tocher | May 26, 2008 12:08 PM
I joined, but I would really like a way to import my http://del.icio.us/BillyG of 12,700 saves.
btw: The signin here is not optional.
Posted by: BillyG | May 26, 2008 1:00 PM
I'd love to hear some comparison between this and ZigTag. They both seem to have pretty much the same concept.
Posted by: Jere Majava | May 26, 2008 1:51 PM
Check out Calais 2.0's Tageroo widget for WordPress. It does much the same thing, however in addition to automatic suggestions for tags, it also suggests related images that may apply to your text. http://www.opencalais.com/
Posted by: Jeffrey | May 26, 2008 1:52 PM
@Jeffrey Thanks, we covered that previously here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/calais_gets_a_wordpress_plugin.php if anyone wants to read about that in more detail.
But not to confuse the issue - the difference is that Faviki is a social bookmarking service similar to del.icio.us, whereas you are pointing to a Wordpress plugin.
Posted by: Sarah Perez
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May 26, 2008 2:18 PM
How does Faviki differ from Twine? They sound very similar to me - except for Faviki using DBPedia.
Thanks
Posted by: Kim Woodbridge | May 26, 2008 3:22 PM
Sarah said...
At the recent Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, predicted that over the next 10-15 years, tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web, while keywords disappear.
No, this is completely wrong. Tags will undoubtedly play an important role in the future structure of the web, however key-words , phrases or short paragraphs will still be there. Why, it is because computers are programmed to mimic how human retrieve & process information, and key-words/phrases/paragraphs are vital to that. Without key-words/phrases/paragraphs then information is very hard to be searchable. The other reason is key-words/phrases/paragraphs gives the ability for retrieving by concept similarity/proximity, where a pure symbolic semantic based search will fail to address that. Symbolic search is a true-false (boolean) scenario. You either take a hit (where polysemy or synonymy are ignored) or no hit. Similarity/proximity search which relies on key-words/phrases/paragraphs can be very wide apart in terms of distance (eg - euclidean distance), but there is always another concept which is a neighbour of the target query that can be retrieved as a match (although low percentage because of the wide euclidean distance).
Posted by: Falafulu Fisi | May 26, 2008 4:00 PM
Nice article.
And yeah..update wikipedia link in post.
Posted by: Ajit | May 26, 2008 10:35 PM
@Kim...
Twine is more of a personal knowledge management and recommendation engine. Twine would be similar to http://www.zimesh.com or http://www.quitera.com
These guys try to connect you to the right people
and right information.
Posted by: Jerry | May 26, 2008 10:39 PM
Great Idea....But should Wikipedia be the standard ?
Wikipedia is not Semantic.....and not matter what tools you use to try to make the data Semantic.....They will fall short of any effort that is done from the bottom up....So this tool allows for "Semantic" tagging using an Un Semantic library of often inaccurate data ?
Posted by: william | May 26, 2008 10:44 PM
I've been using faviki (user: matt) for a week and a bit, and I love it. The developer is a great person, the design is clean and very usable, and the features are plentiful but never bloated.
Feel free to add me as a friend, would be good to be more connected at faviki to see more of how it works.
Posted by: Matt Harwood | May 27, 2008 12:25 AM
Sounds rather interesting if you ask me. I like the idea of it doing the "tags" for you. I'm off to check it out right now.
Posted by: Spuds | May 27, 2008 2:09 AM
Faviki is limiting itself to Wikipedia definitions to tag pages. It doesn't allow for 'undefined' tags. While this does lend itself to keeping the data clean, or as clean as Wikipedia data, it doesn't allow me to tag pages with words I want to use as search terms in the future. http://www.zigtag.com allows such tags and can import my bookmarks from other services as well. I like that flexibility to use semantic tagging when I want or need to.
Posted by: Jeff | May 27, 2008 12:22 PM
Thank you for such an insightful post :) I think you really helped people understand the idea behind Faviki.
Vuk Milicic
founder of Faviki
Posted by: Vuk Milicic | May 27, 2008 1:25 PM
@Jeff
I agree that Faviki limits expressivness but that's the whole point. By making you choose between 2.3 million tags from Wikipedia, it actually makes you organize your bookmarks better and, more importantly, add real meaning to those bookmarks and relate them using clear, concrete semantics.
I guarantee that this lack of expressivness actually pays off in the long run - it will be much easier to find bookmarks, yours or anyone else's.
Posted by: Vuk Milicic | May 27, 2008 2:05 PM
Very interesting for sure. I just signed up an account and gonna try it out. user: yesyes
Posted by: Henry Pena | May 28, 2008 8:32 AM
How would I tag items that are late-breaking and not in Wikipedia at all?
btw: I mentioned it in #3 above already, but logging in here is not optional, unless this blog is picking out my IP from the rest of the known universe to force me to populate your form fields for comments lol.
Posted by: BillyG | May 28, 2008 12:38 PM