Semantic Web and flickr

Most of us have been to events where participants take photos, but what happens to them at the end of the event?

Recently while taking photos at an event I was good-naturedly hassled about pictures I'd taken at a previous event with the same attendees. I'd put the photos, taken in a semi-private space, up on flickr.

I love taking pictures at events, because it means I have a permanent visual record of the people and the places. It means that in 12 months when a participant emails me I can reacquaint myself with the face that matches the name and email address. It also gives me something to illustrate my blog with.

On reflection, I believed I could do better than just blatting all the images up publicly on flickr. After a little editorial work (i.e. throwing out the really bad ones), I uploaded them to flickr privately and emailed the participants of the event the URLs of the images they're in, to give them the option of veto. This works because flickr uses authorisation only for HTML pages, images' privacy is protected due to the obscurity of the URL. All but one participant got back to me and approved the images. I have no idea whether the remaining participant objected to their photos, didn't receive the email or just never got around to responding. Once I'd had the bulk of the responses I started to make the images public.

The attached MP3 provides continuing coverage of a series of interviews conducted at the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. Listen as Marilu Goodyear hosts a 30 minute interview with Phil Long, Senior Strategist for the Academic Computing Enterprise at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among other things, they take on the issue of patents, discuss Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, and tackle the prospects for continued research on learning space design.

It seems to me a natural consequence of the increasing bridging of traditional data sources into RDF is that the number of "walled gardens" of RDF is increasing. Walled gardens are areas from which there is no escape, and while they certainly have their uses (in particular controlling who can access what), they erode the overall usefulness of the system as a whole, by meaning that you literally can't get to there from here.

Examples of RDF walled gardens include the FOAF generated by such systems as tribe.net and livejournal. While it is useful that these sites are exposing data in a machine readable web 2.0 format such as RDF/FOAF, the inability to link to people, resources and interests outside the walled garden represent a significant barrier to interoperability. I am the same person in my blog RSS feed, my flickr photo feed, my del.icio.us feed , my tribe FOAF and my hand-edited FOAF, but only the last can I link to the others, despite the fact that they are all in the same format.

In the last two-three years a huge amount has been written about tagging and folksonomies, much of it with the bright-eyed enthusiasm of those who haven't seen the present state of affairs in a broader light; but where is the fight-back from the formal classificationists, who hither-to ruled unchallenged in this area? Have such giants as the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal System fallen at the first hurdle?

Tagging is the assigning of arbitrary tags to content by amateurs (typically content creators, editors or readers) and folksonomies are systems built from the ground up using these tags. Tags have no formal meanings and there are no constraints placed upon them. Folksonomies are central to systems such as flickr, del.icio.us and the whole web 2.0 approach.

Formal classifications, such as the the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal System are rigorous systems in which trained individuals assign subject categories to content. Each category has a description and is long lived—categories don't change even when the words used to describe the topic in popular culture change. Thus the LoC still calls cars automobiles, because that's what they were called when they first entered the system.