Knewco: Community Tags
May 29, 2008
Peter Suber offers a clear, detailed post about a new approach to community tags. You can read his post “Combining OA, Wikis, Community Annotation, Semantic Processing, and Text Mining” here. Mr. Suber includes a link to a discussion of the idea in Genome Biology here.
What’s interesting to me is the specialist nature of the effort. Although anyone can tag, the focus is STM (scientific, technical, and medical). The idea is to create rich indexing for technical information. I think this is a good idea. I think there will be challenges because a small number of people do most of the work. Nevertheless, these types of projects are sorely needed.
The company responsible for the technology is Knewco, founded by several academics. You can learn more about the firm here. Knewco has developed some tag options that are interesting. I think the value will come from POW or “plain old words”.
Why do I care about this and what’s the wiki variant have to do with search? Well, a lot. First, technical information has long been in the hands of a small number of multi-national firms. If you want to search engineering or chemical information, you have to use specialist files and sometimes pay big, big online access charges. This type of project is one more example of the research community feeling its oats. Good for researchers and potentially threatening to the oligopolies in the STM information business.
Second, I like the idea that information innovation is coming from thinkers outside the traditional IR (information retrieval) community. When I go to conferences, there are 20-somethings who have an opportunity to lecture me on their major insight, Use For references. Okay, been there. Done that. Fresh thinking is important, and I am delighted that Knewco is trying pop ups, colors, and other bells and whistles that may point to some new directions in tagging.
Finally, the larger the body of publicly accessible tags, the better the next-generation systems will be. Google, as I point out in my new study due out in September 2008, is focused on making its software smarter. Humans play a role, but the GOOG knows the value of indexing, taxonomies, tags, and their breathern.
On the downside, I don’t like the company name “Knewco”. In fact, Knewco uses coinages for its different functions; for example, a “knowlet”. I hate having to memorize a neologism for something I call a cross reference. But that’s a personal preference. Check the company’s Web technology here.
Stephen Arnold, May 29, 2008
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