Linked Data & Twitter annotations enthusiasm

[R_Macdonald]

I am awestruck by the potential of developers applying Linked Data /
Semantic Web schema and using RDF/OWL in Twitter annotations. It would
massively scale search effectiveness and distribution opportunities
while allowing sophisticated on-the-fly analysis of Twitter's firehose
& other feeds.

Of course, the applicability of Linked Data expressions within Twitter
annotations is dependent on how big a namespace payload they allow.
Twitter engineer Marcel Molina @noradio opined last Friday they are
thinking of 2K http://bit.ly/aW5fCO

I suspect Twitter will be uncommonly open to considering the scaling
effects Linked Data could offer.

The Twitter ecosystem is particularly suited to applying principles of
the Semantic Web in that machine interpolated meaning could be
continually refined the more humans tweet & retweet about the same and
related topics (resolved by semantic entity detection; coupled with
author, location, hashes, platform, temporal and other information.

You might be interested in the work of Martin Hepp, of the Business &
Web Science Research Group, Universität der Bundeswehr München
http://www.heppnetz.de/
His application, HyperTwitter http://semantictwitter.appspot.com/
brings RDF-thinking to tweet hash tags.

Of course, OpenCalais and Zemanta would be thrilled to have their
engines parse Twitter Linked Data annotations, it would bring
significant value to their clients’ media by associating them with
strongly-related Tweet content and their pointers.

Link TV’s “ViewChange” project http://www.linktv.org/viewchange/technology,
supported by a $1M+ grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
is a great example of emerging Linked Data applications that are
attempting to leverage Semantic Web principles and the power of film
to dynamically present opportunities to learn more and engage in
public interest issues. Still in development, the ViewChange platform
could derive significant benefit from Twitter RDF-annotations. They
would expose platform users to potentially-reliable realtime issue-
related Twitter content and sentiment. Social movements are informed
by the “then” and impelled by the “now.”

Author reliability and trustworthiness will be key to the value of
potential Link Data implementations within Twitter annotations.
Semantic entity & URI spamming, and worse, can be mitigated by the
development of more robust OpenID schema and applying rigorous “Web
Reputation” system algorithms. For more on OpenID see the work of
Chris Messina http://factoryjoe.com/ and colleagues. Randall Farmer
http://buildingreputation.com/ is an expert in Web Reputation systems,
O’Reilly just published his book on same last month.
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596159801

I think Twitter annotations may well be a turning point in the early
practical application of Tim Berners-Lee’s 1999 “dream for the Web [in
which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web –
the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.”

It is all about the metadata!


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