Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web

What’s cool about tags is that you can easily tag the same information with multiple tags. Does the information fall in #techcomm, #contentstrategy, and #findability disciplines? You don’t have to choose one folder to assign the content to. With tags, resources can live in multiple places at once.

Tagging is emerging as one of the most common ways to organize resources on the web. Smith notes that Delicious, a social bookmarking site that first appeared in 2003, was one of the first instances of tagging to emerge online. However, he also notes that classification and metadata strategies have been ongoing for centuries, with the Dewey Decimal system as one of the prime examples.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://idratherbewriting.com/2011/12/26/using-tags-to-increase-findability/

You can find the whole blog entry at http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/facebook-gets-broad-patent-on-digital-media-tagging/10693

You can find all the information at http://lcav.epfl.ch/research/automatic_image_annotation

The real strength of this image advertising platform is how it lets people who visit a site looking for specific products buy them directly by merely clicking on the tags that are featured.

EmmaActive means that no more will anybody have to look for the best spot to buy anything they saw and liked when browsing the Web. This service turns every image that is tagged into something that can be purchased. And since people are being rewarded for taking their time to tag products, everything comes full circle.

Read more: http://www.killerstartups.com/eCommerce/emmaactive-com-tag-products-on-images

The idea is to allows users to upload high-resolution images, work on them adding information over specific areas of the image and interact with other users through standard social network tools.

If you want more information, do not hesitate to visit their website at http://www.speakingimage.org or having a look at the tour.

OpenDover uses semantic technologies for sentiment tagging texts that you send to the service. Sentiment/emotion tags are returned to users for implementing in web applications, searches, blogs and so on.

On the other han, OpenDover provides a Web service that lets you tag your documents based on sentiments and emotions found in your documents. The OpenDover API can handle different ways of sentiment tagging, depending on what your needs are, or what the content is that you provide via the API.

The OpenDover knowledge base consists of thousands of opinion words, domain-related words and relations organized hierarchically. Since OpenDover is ontology-based, it can recognize the subject domains of the documents parsed via the API.

They also provide a live demo at http://demo.opendover.nl/.

Currently, more than 80% of the information exchanged on the Web carry personal data and are primarily of multimedia nature (video, audio, images, etc.). Two main reasons are behind this phenomenon: 1) each of the major players on the Internet (individual users, companies, local and/or regional authorities, etc.) is both data producer and data consumer at the same time, and 2) the use of various tools of Web 2.0 (blogs, social networks, etc.) allows to ease sharing, accessing, and publishing information on the Web. While such tools provide users many easy-to-use functionalities, several issues, however, remain unaddressed. For instance, how to automate the processes of annotation and description of some photos using the annotations/descriptions provided by the user friends on his/her blog/wiki/social network? How to provide the user with more effective and expressive means to multimedia information retrieval? How to protect a multimedia data repository (e.g., photo album) while several related information about the same content is already published (by some user friends) on the same or other blog/wiki/social network?

The general aim of this special issue is to assess the current approaches and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives, related to the use of Web 2.0 in providing automatic annotation and easing retrieval and access control of multimedia data. It aims to provide an overview of the state of the art and future directions in this field, by including a wide range of interdisciplinary contributions from various research groups.

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Semantic Web and Web 2.0
• Social Networks
• Multimedia Semantics
• Contextual Multimedia Metadata
• Annotation Enriching
• Query Rewriting
• Metadata Modeling and Contextual Ontologies for Multimedia Applications
• Management of Multimedia Metadata (Relational and XML Databases, Semantic Stores, etc.)
• Multimedia Authoring
• Multimedia-based Access Control and Authorization
• Multimedia Retrieval
• Personalizing Multimedia Content
• Cross-media Clustering
• Mobile Applications
• Multimedia Web Applications and Related Metadata Support
• Novel and Challenging Multimedia Applications

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: November 15, 2010
• Notification of First Round of Review: January 30, 2011
• Submission of the Revised Manuscript: March 15, 2011
• Notification of Final Acceptance: April 30, 2011
• Camera-ready Submission: May 30, 2011

Submission

Authors are invited to submit contributions at the journal Online Submission System ( http://www.editorialmanager.com/mtap ) not exceeding 8000 words (approx. 20 pages single-spaced) including diagrams and references with at least 10-point Times Roman like font. All submissions will undergo a blind peer review by at least three external expert reviewers to ensure a high standard of quality. Referees will consider originality, significance, technical soundness, clarity of exposition, and relevance to the special issue topics above. Since a “blind” paper evaluation method will be used, authors are kindly requested to produce and provide the full paper, WITHOUT any reference to any of the authors. The manuscript must contain, in its first page, the paper title, an abstract and a list of keywords but NO NAMES OR CONTACT DETAILS WHATSOEVER are to be included in any part of this file.

Guest Editors

• Richard Chbeir (Bourgogne University, France, richard.chbeir@u-bourgogne.fr)
• Vincent Oria (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA, oria@homer.njit.edu)

Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content.

You can find all the information about Twitter Annotations at groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/fa5da2608865453?pli=1

What do you think about this upcoming feature? What would be the potential of semantically tagging tweets using Common Tags, for example, instead of hastags? Leave your comments below to start the discussion

Objective 1 of the annotation project is to have human beings (you) identify whether an ASD citation contains mention of a gene. At this point we are asking people to annotate 20 articles but it is fine if you do less. If Objective 1 goes well, later objectives will include spotting particular mentions of genes in ASD citations and the holy grail of genetics text mining, relationships between genes and other biologically relevant entities.

You can find all the information about the BioNotate project here: http://bionotate.hms.harvard.edu/autism/index.html

On the last 4th of February, IBM patented a way to improve traditional free-text tagging with semantic capabilities basically to improve the exploitation of those annotations/tags. If you are interested on the patent, you can find it just here.

Regarding this free-text tagging vs. more semantic tagging techniques, we should not forget the existence of an specification on these same matters called CommonTag. Of course, the IBM’s patent is more focused on the automatic generation/extraction of the semantics behind free-text tagging (tag clouds) than to directly tag resources semantically. ]]> http://blog.insemtives.eu/2010/02/ibms-patent-about-tagging-and-the-semantic-web/feed/ 0 http://blog.insemtives.eu/2010/02/muppets-meet-the-internet-and-youtube-annotations/ http://blog.insemtives.eu/2010/02/muppets-meet-the-internet-and-youtube-annotations/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:51:34 +0000 gtorodelvalle http://blog.insemtives.eu/?p=222 Shortest post ever

Enjoy!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAtBki0PsC0

Players of Phrase Detectives have submitted nearly 1 million relationships between phrases, with over 200 documents completed – a total of 60,000 words. From this point, a panel of expert linguists analysed a selection of documents and in most cases the top answer from Phrase Detectives (i.e. the answer that most detectives agreed with) was correct. This is great news as it shows that, by collaborating in a group, players make the right decisions in the end.

This month’s competition is a daily prize draw where you could win an Amazon voucher just by playing the game. The more you play each day the greater chance you have of winning. Winners will be updated on the homepage and contacted via email. More details are on the website…

On the other hand, there have also been updates to the game. You can now see all the completed documents – maybe you were the one who made the final decision on a document? There are also more hints and tips about playing the game. And remember you can score points for signing up new players, just email the link on your player homepage to your friends.

More info at: http://anawiki.essex.ac.uk/phrasedetectives/

Noticings are interesting things that you stumble across when out and about. For example: perplexing pavement markings, a discarded photo, and a ceramic space invader are all noticings.

Players are awarded points for things like spotting the first thing in a neighbourhood, or noticing something every day for a week.

You play Noticings by uploading your photos to Flickr, tagged with ‘noticings’ and geotaggedwith where they were taken. We’ve got a page with the rules and some instructions to help you out.

They offer an iPhone app to upload and to tag your images directly from your iPhone.

More info at http://noticin.gs/.

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• Noticings: Geotagging Photo Game Powered by Flickr API (readwriteweb.com)

The Federal Register is “[t]he official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.” It’s published by the U.S. government, five days a week. The Federal Register tells citizens what their government is doing, in a lot more detail than the news media do.

FedThread makes the Federal Register more open and accessible. FedThread gives users:

• Collaborative annotation: users can attach a note to any paragraph of the Federal Register; a conversation thread hangs off of every paragraph.
• Advanced search: users can search the Federal Register (going back to 2000) on full text, by date, agency, and other fields.
• Customized feeds: any search can be turned into an RSS feed. The resulting feed will include any new items that match the search query. Feeds can be delivered by email as well.

Via: PrivacyDigest.com

In some sense, it reminded me of the Google Gaudi initiative.

Via: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kutano_launches_first_client_for_google_sidewiki.php

The Scribo project will take part in the Open World Forum, the leading global summit bringing together decision-makers from across the world to discuss the technological, financial and social impact of open technologies. On October 1,2 2009, the Open World Forum 2009 will bring together all the key players in the open source ecosystem to cross-fertilize initiatives for innovation and economic growth.

To create annotations users need a Google account, being able to annotate the whole Web page or portions of it.

The current version of Google sidewiki allow users:

• To keep track of the comments they have already read.
• To value other’s annotations as useful or not.
• To share annotations via link, email, Twitter and Facebook.
• To access all the annotations created by any user.

Once installed from http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html, you can visit http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/prevention.htm to see Google sidewiki in action.

IMAGINATION is a Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) under the European Union’s 6th Framework programme’s (6FP) Information Society Technologies (IST) priority, more specifically under the IST action line “Access to and preservation of cultural and scientific resources“. The project was started in May, 2006.

The main objective of IMAGINATION is to bring digital cultural and scientific resources closer to their users, by making user interaction image-based and context-aware. Our aim is to enable image-based navigation for digital cultural and scientific resources. Their vision is a system where users receive meaningful contextual information about images and image parts, which makes images easier to understand. Moreover, users can simply navigate to new, relevant images and texts in the knowledge repository only by clicking on interesting image parts.

BTW, you can find very interesting readings at http://www.imagination-project.org/page.php?id=8

It is implemented using Silverlight technology by Microsoft.

You can find all the information at: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html

As stated on the OAC’s Web site: 

Annotating is a pervasive element of scholarly practice for both the humanist and the scientist. It is a method by which scholars organize existing knowledge and facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. It is used by individual scholars when reading as an aid to memory, to add commentary, and to classify. It can facilitate shared editing, scholarly collaboration, and pedagogy. Over time annotations can have scholarly value in their own right. Yet scholars remain dissatisfied with the options available for annotating digital resources. Scholars wanting to annotate have to learn different annotation clients for different content repositories, have no easy way to integrate annotations made on different systems or created by colleagues using other tools, and are often limited to simplistic and constrained models of annotation. The importance of annotating as a scholarly practice coupled with the real-world limitations of existing practices and tools supporting annotation of digital content has had a retarding effect on the growth of digital scholarship and the level of digital resource use by scholars.

The overarching goals of this project (consisting of multiple phases) are:

• To facilitate the emergence of a Web and Resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that allows leveraging annotations across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections. To this end, interoperability specifications will be devised.
• To demonstrate through implementations an interoperable annotation environment enabled by the interoperability specifications in settings characterized by a variety of annotation client/server environments, content collections, and scholarly use cases.
• To seed widespread adoption by deploying robust, production-quality applications conformant with the interoperable annotation environment in ubiquitous and specialized services, tools, and content used by scholars — e.g.: Zotero, AXE, LORE, Co-Annotea, Pliny; JSTOR, AustLit, MONK.

(via: DigitalKoans)

Abstract: YouTube’s Collaborative Annotations

More and more YouTube videos no longer provide a passive viewing experience, but rather entice the viewer to interact with
the video by clicking on objects with embedded links. These links are part of YouTube’s Annotations system, which enables content owners to add active overlays on top of their videos. YouTube Annotation overlays also enable adding dynamic speech bubbles and pop-ups which can function as an ever-changing layer of supplementary information and entertainment, augmenting the video experience. This paper addresses the question of whether the ability to add annotation overlays on a given video should be opened to the YouTube public. The basic dilemma in opening a video to collaborative annotations is derived from the tension between the benefits of collaboration and the risks of visual clutter and spam. We term the degree to which a video is open to external contributions as the collaboration spectrum, and describe several models that let content owners to explore this spectrum in order to find the optimal way to harness the power of the masses.

Biographie:

Michael Fink’s work bridges media research, machine learning and cognitive science. Michael initiated the YouTube interactive video annotations project, which in the last year became a major driving force in making YouTube videos truly interactive. Previously, Michael worked at Google Research, focusing on image and audio fingerprinting for applications such as the “mass personalization” of broadcast television. His PhD research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem focuses on large scale object recognition in humans and machines, generating publications ranging from machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence to cognitive science, justice and economics. Recently, Michael has initiated an “innovation studies program” in a joint collaboration with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Bezalel Design Academy.