Monday, October 27, 2014

The LexiTags Project

The "LexiTags" name is a concatenation of the terms "lexical" and "tags". It is tagging with lexical items (dictionary words). It is tagging where all tags are precisely defined, what we call "semantic tags".

The first implementation of LexiTagging is in the bookmarking service LexiTags, which is similar to the first popular bookmarking service delicious.com except using semantic tags. The prototype implementation can be viewed here.




When the user bookmarks an interesting web site, they can tag it with an interface that lets them easily insert semantically well defined tags.





The advantage of LexiTags is that application lets users create their personal information maps with the meaningful keywords. The software keeps track of all the keywords in a precise and un ambiguous way. For example, it distinguishes an "order" of a product from an "order" of knighthood. And it knows that "orders" (but not knights) are related to "invoices", and that an "invoice" is similar to a certain type of "bill".

In this way, we help knowledge workers navigate large and complex information maps in a quicker and more effective way.

Users will even be able to share their information maps with colleagues, so that the employees in a company over time build a shared map of all the company's information, and managers can finally find out what goes on in their companies! This data can be shared with linked open data standards. In contrast to existing technologies, LexiTags information maps are build bottom-up by users in their daily work. And it keeps evolving as the focus of interest shifts.

The research involves semantic and artificial intelligence techniques to design smarter user interfaces for streamlined semantic tagging, and for organising the tag sets. We have created a separate tool, SynsetTagger, for organising tags.

LexiTagging is a powerful technique which is used in offshoot projects such as "Metadata made easy", where LexiTagging is used to help webmasters mark up pages with schema.org.





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