Semantic Web vs. Web 2.0

Tim O'Reilly offers interesting thoughts on the nature of the "semantic web" and how it differs from "web 2.0" in a recent post on his O'Reilly Radar. He think both terms are often misused, including in a recent Economist article on three web companies (ValuesOfN, Wesabe, and Tripit). While the distinction is probably obvious to a lot of people, I personally have found his discussion helpful, and I imagine most social scientists could as well.

Online political atlas

For those of us who hope to engage students on issues such as political or economic development, the World Freedom Atlas is a fantastic resource.

Designer Zachary Johnson has created a very slick Flash interface for dozens of datasets (>300 variables) generated by academics, NGOs and IOs on the global distribution of human rights, governance, and development indicators between 1990 and 2006.

WFA not only maps national distributions of each, but also histograms and scatterplots, with the ability to show absolute values vs. change over time.

Can't wait to use it in my intro course.

H/T to information aesthetics for the link.

Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach

Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach

Alex Iskhold has stimulated an interesting discussion at Read/WriteWeb on the somewhat disappointing progress over the past decade toward realizing the semantic web vision. At the heart of the problem, he argues, is the "bottom-up" approach to converting information from the web into RDF and OWL format. Although not offered in this post, he promises a future article outlining an alternative "top-down" model. I, for one, am on the edge of my seat.

Beyond Wiki: 20 References You Can't Do Without

A good overview of essential online references is available from Scholastici.us.

Tracking Political Buzz

Yesterday, Matthew Hurst (Microsoft Live Labs and Data Mining) posted about five projects applying spidering, crawling, and text mining techniques to Track Political Buzz in the United States.

None are anywhere near as ambitious as VOSON (ANU, Canberra), their level of automated processing appears to vary widely, and they could all benefit from seriously (re)considering their information design. But they are all fairly serious attempts to distill relevant statistical and semantic information from the steadily expanding ocean of online political discourse.

These may seem like novelties now, but how long before it's critical that we apply (semi)automated tools to have any hope of seriously engaging the volume and variety of public discourse*?

* A 1999 paper used hand-coding to summarize 4,832 comments submitted for the Hoover National Forest (IN). According to a 2007 report on management plans for the Bitterroot, Lolo and Flathead National Forests (MT), hand-coding is still used. While the number of respondents was still relatively low (~2,800), other issues (e.g., the proposed elimination of the 2001 Roadless Area Rule) have garnered millions of comments.