Semantic Library

Thanks to Rob Styles, I now have a Twine account and have been finding my way around this new Semantic-powered world.

There has been a great deal of discussion about Twine, from the supportive to the disappointed there’s a wide range of opinions about it. Bearing in mind all of this, I am trying it out with an open mind and a commitment to pass comments and feedback to the developers.

As I explore Twine I’m keeping in mind the things that interest me about the Semantic Web: the potential for trust, relationships and more targeted results and information. So far, I think it has a lot of potential.

Starting out: Social networking upside down

If you use many social software sites, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, you’ll be used to building a network of contacts based on people you know. Twine, at least for me, is the opposite approach. You begin with your interests and connect with people based on shared interests or Twine will recommend people to you. Starting with interests is perhaps a bit more like 43 Things. Note the wording – Connect not Friend. This makes me more likely to reach out and connect with people I don’t know, which is important especially on a new service with a (as yet) limited user base.

Recommendations

I’m not sure how it’s being powered, but once you have started to make connections and groups (called Twines) recommendations will appear for other people and Twines to connect with. It is too soon to tell how powerful this might become, but if it is really focused on it could become very valuable. For example, I’d like to find people who work in NGOs in Europe who are interested in web development. While a keyword search could pull up such a result, a Semantic approach might be able to give me a more accurate recommendation.

Starting a Twine

I started a twine on travel to try out linking and connecting interests. You can then invite others to join, add notes and post items to the Twine. This is a feature that is highly promoted. The idea is that you will be able to use Semantic-powered search to locate your item again and find other recommended items.

If you know del.icio.us, Connotea, CiteULike and another number of bookmarking services then you know how this works. Add a bookmarklet to your browser, find a page you like, and add it to your Twine, send it to a friend or save it for yourself. The popup window does need a bit of finetuning at this stage, as once you have more than a few connections or Twines it can be hard to see what you are adding an item to.

Interest Feed

All the actions you take in a Twine, or actions of others are added to your Interest Feed, much like the news feed in Facebook. You can control somewhat which notifications appear there, which is good because it quickly overflows with responses to discussions, new posted items etc. This can also be emailed to you daily but no RSS yet.

Definitely Beta

It’s clear that this really is a beta. There’s navigation inconsistency, search bugs, and incomplete features. But I am sending feedback through the feedback and beta Twines as I see things. It’s the first time I’ve really felt that I’ve had the opportunity to do that, and to do so easily. Most other ‘beta’ sites are of the perpetual beta sort and do not make giving feedback easy.

Do I see Twine taking over from my del.icio.us account? For the moment, I’m going to use both and evaluate them soon. For me, apart from the social bookmarking angle of Twine, what I am most interested in is recommendations and I am interested to see whether del.icio.us’ tag based approach to discovery or Twine’s Semantic push approach works better for me.

Twine has a lot of interesting features, and I like that they are really taking on board feedback. I received good comments about my first bit of feedback yesterday (request for OpenID in profiles and deduplication of posted items in Twines) and this does encourage me to send in more.  I’ll give a more detailed review soon!

Read/Write Web reports that Yahoo will begin indexing RDF and a range of Microformats. This is big news. It’s the first big sign that established, large players in search are including the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web has been under development for years, and now we are starting to get to the top of the mountain and see over it to where we can go with all these new standards and tools.

Yahoo has outlined what they will be supporting initially, and it’s a pretty big list -

In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Yahoo! Search will work with the web community to evolve the vocabulary framework for embedding structured data. For starters, we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources.

Yahoo has had some support for this already (check the review of Operator below) , but perhaps this will be just the push many website developers need to include Microformats in their sites.

Microformats?

They are a structured way to make use of open content on the Internet. If you would like to see what Microformats have the potential to do, check out the Microformats site. A practical way to try this out is to install the Operator plugin for Firefox. When enabled, if you browse a site that makes use of, for example, hCard, you can right click and download the data or use the toolbar to perform lookups on other sites. Having used Operator, in some ways Yahoo’s announcement about their support for the Semantic Web and Microformats is not such a surprise, as many of the sites mentioned below are Yahoo or Yahoo-owned.

Using Operator

Here I am on Twitter – using Operator I can export and save my hCard contact information, bookmark, or, here’s the really nifty part, add it to my contacts (if I was using Yahoo! Contacts, that is).

If I’m in Upcoming and see something I want to go to, I can add it to my Google or Yahoo calendar. Here’s an event I’m actually going to -

With a click it’s in my Google Calendar -

So why is this cool? I didn’t have to type a thing, or run a search. With Microformats I can extract information out of webpages, find related stuff, save details for later, in a really easy and time saving way.

How might libraries make use of it? How about quick downloading of records and citations out of catalogues and databases into other sites, an article or even into your mobile phone without having to go through painful export options? One click to store? I’d like to see that.