SpeakinAbout

From SpeakinAbout

SpeakinAbout is a new project aimed at "exploiting user gratification for collaborative semantic annotation". In simple terms, it means I'm researching on ways to make you happy so you'll be glad to collaborate in annotating Web contents with semantic tags. Here's the abstract for a paper I'm going to present about this project:

Semantic annotations could improve the Legacy Web by adding semantics to information which has already been published in form of untructured text. Semi-automatic annotation tools seem the most viable way to obtain a contribution from users without requiring them to have a deep knowledge about semantics, however the effort to make them work is still, most of the times, not worth the reward for using them. This paper presents a collaborative semi-automatic annotation approach for Web pages which requires almost no knowledge about semantics on the user side, but nevertheless provides an immediate advantage for the whole community: annotated data become automatically linked to a whole set of online services and resources specific to their related concepts, thus providing an instant reward for users in the form of additional available information.

What does it mean? It's easy as 1-2-3:

1) You'll have a firefox extension that allows you to select a piece of text inside a Web page, open a menu and choose the "Speakin'About" option.

2) Some concepts will be suggested as possible choices of what they're speaking about in the page. For instance, if you select "Harry Potter" you'll be able to choose between the book, the movie, the videogame and so on.

3) Once you choose the concept that best fits for you, the selected text will become a link, providing you with lots of new information related to that name, considered as that particular concept. For instance, look at what happens when you search for Harry Potter as a book...