Alexandre Passant

I'm happy to announce CommonTag, a new RDFS vocabulary for Semantic Tagging, designed to bridge the gap between free-text tagging and Linked Data. In a similar way that what I've done in the past with MOAT, CommonTag allows one to create links between his tags (as simple keywords) and the concept they represent, defined as URIs of Semantic Web resources, from public knowledge bases such as Freebase or DBpedia.

What is especially relevant with regards to CommonTag is that the vocabulary aims to be simple to understand, easily accessible, and with an easy RDFa annotation process for end-users and Web developers. On the other hand, it features mappings with existing tagging vocabularies (the Tag Ontology, MOAT, SCOT, SIOC and SKOS) for those who want to go further or use their existing applications with this new model.

But most interestingly, as one can see when browsing the website, a key feature is that CommonTag is not an isolated initiative but supported by various companies involved in the Semantic Web and the Social Web -- and especially in both ! -- namely (for the initial nucleus and by alphabetical order, hope it will grow soon !) AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo, Zemanta and ZigTag - and I must add that was a great experience to design this vocabulary together !

CommonTag is already supported in various applications as you can see on the website and on the following picture, from Zemanta to index your blog posts to Sindice to build applications on the top of it. And there is more to come soon, stay tuned ;-)