Friday 5 October 2007

Global tagging with Fuzzzy

Fuzzzy 2.0 was launched October 1.st. Among the many new features is global tagging support.

Global tagging enables everyone around the world to participate on building tags that are connected. Instead of adding dumb text categories to your Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks or your weblog posts, you can now use a shared pool of tags. By moving away from simple folksonomy tags that are only valid within the single site you can move on to semantic tags that bring with them connectivity and meaning. This increases knowledge sharing by having a shared vocabulary. It also increases findability, learning and consistency.

Try it out for your self:
A. Distributed tagging
If you open the tag "Topic Maps" http://www.fuzzzy.com/tag/?id=1607
you can click the icon that looks like three red connected nodes. Then some dummy related tags from the tag network will be loaded. At this moment there are just two tag servers.

B. Tag server functionality.
On this dummy blog http://om.niscio.us/cowboyroy/ you can tag the blog post with tags from the Fuzzzy tag server.

How was it made possible?
The simple version for those of you who don’t use most of your spare time reading geeky stuff: Global tagging is made possible by the organic tag-set of Fuzzzy which is built upon the Topic Map ISO standard and an underlying infrastructure with web services. Members of the online community can create tags and relations between them. Users can also vote, comment and in a democratic way participate to build a shared tag vocabulary.

Now the geek version: By using Topic Maps for semantic interoperability and the built in identification model with Public Subject Identifiers (PSI’s) tags becomes universally identifiable. The globally connected tags become a shared vocabulary for both people and computers. By using web services with simplified XTM fragments any peer tagging site can request from all other peers related tags for tags that are found throughout the network. If in two different domains the same subject is mentioned then these domains are be connected when the subject has a published identifier. When a user makes a request for related tags at the global level a request goes out to all peers. The list of remote sites are replicated and stored on each peer. A webservice call such as this one http://www.fuzzzy.com/ws/GetTagByPSI/?psi=http://www.fuzzzy.com/tag/3053 is issued and all related tags are returned as XTM. The associated tags at the remote site can then be viewed or imported.

Thursday 24 May 2007

Why was fuzzzy developed

Fuzzzy was part of Roy Lachica's masters' thesis. The purpose of the project was to:
  1. Test a new type of metadata categorization, namely the "folktology" (folk + ontology) a semantic tagging system which resembles folksonomies but are built on Topic Maps.
  2. To investigate polyscopic, democratic, collaborative and holistic aspects of knowledge creation.
  3. For personal benefits. To learn Topic Maps and to become more nerd.