Why Bother…
From Talis: “Jim Hendler at the INSEMTIVE 2008 Workshop”
“that people will (and do) create metadata when there are obvious and immediate benefits in them doing so. No-one really consciously sits down to share or create metadata: they sit down to do a specific task and metadata drops out as a side-effect.”
I can not agree any more. I have tried to tag all my blogs once upon a time, after a few weeks, I found myself bored because there is no clear, immediate benefits for doing so. I would only tag things that I have to, like to tell my friends a list of posts of the same topic.
The only tagging system that is consistently successful upon me is the gmail labeling: I organize mails related to the same task (like writing a paper) on daily bases, because it is very useful, and immediately useful. Even though, I only label a tiny fragment of all my emails.
I have seen too many people have their desktop full of files and too lazy to organize them - myself is one of them. Every year I have to spare a day or two to reorganize my harddisk, and dig out the hidden treasures of my “Downloads” folder. I believe for semantic web to be successful, creating an ontology should be at least as easy as and as useful as organizing files on a harddisk.
In fact, people are creating meta data or even ontology everyday: every email sorting, every contact on the cell phone, every folder creating, every calender item, every wiki post, … We just need to make them explicit, and most of all, without bothering the user to click even one more button.
Jie Bao
that reminds me the CMU image tagging game that adopts collective intelligence approach. Web users need a strong incentive to contributed data or metadta. A game, a reward, a grade, a better knowledge management environment, a cool showoff, a funded research project, and so on…