As the world keeps tagging, how can we integrate this collective intelligence on a Web-scale? KMi project Revyu joins the effort to find out

The Web has seen a recent explosion in tagging – using keywords to annotate things. High profile examples include the sites Flickr for tagging photos, del.icio.us for bookmarking and tagging Web pages, and last.fm for tagging music. The wealth of tagging data now available brings many opportunities, but also many challenges; how can we combine tag data from different sources, technically and semantically?

To address these issues, Tom Gruber (well known for his pioneering work on ontologies in artificial intelligence) has founded the TagCommons – a group of people interested in meeting these challenges, and a process for doing so. KMi student Tom Heath has joined the TagCommons effort, contributing experience gained in developing Revyu, the reviewing and rating site for the Semantic Web.

Writing on the TagCommons blog about Functional Requirements for Sharing Tag Data, Gruber notes:

The technical requirements for tagging systems to participate in the Semantic Web include the need to define a ontology of tagging data that could be used across the variety of tagging systems which could participate. An excellent example of this is the Revyu.com site, which is a user review site with tagging that exposes its tag data using a tag ontology and exposes its data in RDF.

Revyu is one of the first sites we know of that does this with real data, rather than simply for demonstration purposes. Furthermore, all the data in Revyu is available to be queried using the SPARQL query language for the Semantic Web. As both the Semantic Web and the TagCommons effort continue to make rapid progress, we expect this approach to become increasingly common, enabling a new generation of tag-based data integration.

Related Links:

• TagCommons
  
• TagCommons Blog: Functional Requirements for Sharing Tag Data
  
• Revyu.com
  
• Revyu project page at KMi
  
• Tom Gruber