Emergent Semantics

March 13, 2005 - Eric Meyer

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An Emerging Semantician

- 2-year-old using sign language, creating new meanings by combining signs

Emergent Semantics

• no director, semantics created ad-hoc and added & evolve over time
• not the same as the Semantic Web effort
  - often called the "lowercase semantic web"

Basic Principles

• define a microformat that solves a problem (see: Technorati wiki microformat)
• use existing XHTML structures
• use existing standards that aren't expressible in XHTML
• need to be human-understandible
  e.g. XHTML
  & don't worry about machines getting it, humans will fix machines so they do

Example: paths created where people are already walking
"Pave the cow paths"
- an evolutionary process

Who Can Do This?

• anyone, without waiting for approval
• identify a narrow problem and come up with a simple way to solve it
• create a metadata profile at a stable URI (keeps standards purists happy)

Examples

• Google's rel="nofollow"
• Creative Commons license-link annotation
• XFN
  "Metrolling" → create a list of everyone you met at SXSW with rel="met"
• Vote Links (Technorati)
• hCard, hCalendar
  reproduce vCard (.vcf) and iCal in XHTML

Metrolling

• list of people you met, link to their sites
• add rel="met" to link
• can extend with additional XFN
• rubhub.com is an aggregator for XFN
  ping it with your metroll
• establishes a rudimentary trust network
  all these sites belong to real people, i.e. not bots or hoaxes

Identity Consolidation

• XFN can create a cohesive online identity from pieces with the "me" value
  e.g. associate your LiveJournal with your web site with Friendster profile, etc.
• "me" only works when there's a reciprocal link back from a profile
  keeps people from pretending to be celebrities, for example

Cross Breed & Mutate Microformats

• cross XFN with VoteLinks to see what your friends like/dislike
• XFN + hCalendar to see what your friends are doing

Important thing to remember about microformats: search engines can index them

Microformats are a way of saying what you were thinking when you wrote something

Next Steps

• search engines starting to capture rel tags, needs to be expanded
• API calls to rel values?
• scripts to convert to/from microformats
  e.g. hCard to vCard and back
• collections of links to microformatted pages

Remember, this can work well for intranets

If you create your own microformat, you can create your own search engine to find that microformat

Suggestion: can use multiple formats just like XML to resolve conflicts (like namespacing)
- but is better just not to use conflicting formats
- suggest resolving, merging or picking one of conflicting microformats