I’m happy to announce the MOAT project:
MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) provides a Semantic Web framework to publish semantically-annotated content from free-tagging.
While tags are widely used in Web 2.0 services, their lack of machine-understandable meaning can be a problem for information retrieval, especially when people use tags that can have different meanings depending on the context.
MOAT aims to solve this by providing a way for users to define meaning(s) of their tag(s) using URIs of Semantic Web resources (such as URIs from dbpedia, geonames … or any knowledge base), and then annotate content with those URIs rather than free-text tags, leveraging content into Semantic Web, by linking data together. Moreover, tag meanings can be shared between people, providing an architecture of participation to define and exchange potential meanings of tags within a community of users.
To achieve this goal, MOAT relies on an architecture that can be deployed for any organisation or community and that involves a lightweight ontology, a MOAT server, and some third-party clients .
More details about the framework and its implementation are described on the project website. A demo server is available here, and updates should be done soon (code and documentation).
