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).

In summary:

   * Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs    * The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months    * It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago    * On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day    * 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created    * Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily       pings Technorati receives    * Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9%       of new blogs are spam or machine generated    * Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour    * Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day    * Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted       a critical mass of topical bloggers

So, my first app is RecordShops, located at http://recordshops.ning.com. It aims to be a worldwide directory of independant music shops^[1] where users can freely add their shops and tag and/or rate others’ ones. Shops can then be sorted and found by ratings, tags, locations …

The service also provides a map to locate shops – using GoogleMaps – and an RSS feed that lists last added shops.

Have fun, add shops, rate, tag… so that I’ll get news shops to discover next time I’ll go abroad

Via affordance.info

On a ainsi une première distinction entre les tags relatifs au contenu et les méta-données du bookmark (genre, jugement qualitatif …), comme évoqué dans ce billet et la discussion associée.

J’aimerai cependant bien savoir comment sont gérés les domaines (car comme toute catégorisation, ça reste subjectif), et la classification de nouveaux tags apparents.