Link Roundup

I've had a bunch of articles open in Firefox tabs for weeks that I've been meaning to blog about, and I've decided to accept the fact that I'm not going to blog about them and just post the links for your reading pleasure.

A nice interview with Tim Berners-Lee about the Semantic Web.

Geotagging and potential uses thereof.

A Library Thing for Libraries success story, or why the flexibility and democracy of tags often beats the rigid, top-down LCC subject headings.

Martha Yee's "Will the Response of the Library Profession to the Internet Be Self-Immolation?" (WARNING: link is a .doc) and the discussion thereof on the JESSE listserv.

An automated method for assessing the trustworthiness of Wikipedia edits based on the trustworthiness ratings of the contributors who made the edits. This is one of the coolest things I've seen in awhile. It's a little jarring to see chunks of text highlighted in orange while you're reading, and the articles I looked at had things flagged as untrustworthy based on the contributors' reputation that I know were perfectly accurate, but it's still a really neat idea.

"Are Tags Vannevar Bush's Trails?"

Hakia, which is billing itself as a Semantic search engine. I'm not sure it's clearly better than Google at this point, but it's got them beat in certain categories. Google won hands-down in a search for "Who is the president of Slovenia?"--Hakia took me to a subject page all about Slovenia, which is well-organized and spiffy in itself but wasn't quite what I was looking for, while Google gave me the answer right at the top of the page above its search results. On the other hand, when searching for "What is the molecular weight of carbon monoxide?" and "How many symphonies did Beethoven compose?," Hakia highlighted the answer in the search results(!) and Google made me actually skim the page. But, regardless, it warms the cockles of my cynical little heart to see people out there who take semantic search seriously. And if the Hakia folks manage to pull off everything that they say that they want to pull off, this could be great.