It is no secret that I love machine readable formats. Unlike some, I don’t have issues with the Semantic Web, microformats, etc. Over time we will end up reaching an appropriate equilibrium where appropriate methods are aligned with the appropriate task.
A very simple way of building structure and meta-information into content is tagging. To borrow from George Michael, not everybody does it, but everybody should. I only wish that they’d settle on one way of representing tags. Anyway, some time ago, I noticed Chris Messina ending his posts on Twitter with “#xxxxx” (henceforth known as a hashtag). At the time, I just thought it was to help Chris with some tracker he had written. Then Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned hashtags.org, which is how I ended up finding the site. What hashtags do is essentially provide a tagging system for Twitter, which can be tracked via the hashtags.org site. It’s simple, and uses the Twitter API to provide additional functionality.
Where am I going with this? It points to something that we should do more in the sciences (and in general). Simple solutions that allow us to tag information and find it. Meta-data is one of the most important aspects of scientific information. While there are solutions that allow you to parse and store meta-data and query it later, they are usually complex and applicable under certain scenarios (e.g. in a corporate scenario). On the other hand, there is ample room for simple solutions. Solutions that allow us to share information informally and mine it, follow it, etc for relevant information.
Further reading
Learning from tech – Better APIs
The value of feature extraction
Building a global tagspace
3 Comments
what chars are legal in a hash tag?
by excluding ‘=’ you can support something extra
Tags are a sort of implied boolean
#sunset #beach
is equivalent to
#sunset=True #beach=True
but this leaves open the possibility of tags such as
#sunset #beach #temp=84F #camera=’cannon powershot’
I am not so sure. My understanding was that everything after the “#” is tracked. What you describe above is actually very neat. Reminds me of “rel” tags in a way. Hashtags as implemented today are somewhat limited due to the 140 character limit in Twitter. However, it would be interesting if Twitter was to become smart enough to ignore everything between a “# and the next space bar or something along those lines and use hashtags as true metadata.
I am not so sure. My understanding was that everything after the “#” is tracked. What you describe above is actually very neat. Reminds me of “rel” tags in a way. Hashtags as implemented today are somewhat limited due to the 140 character limit in Twitter. However, it would be interesting if Twitter was to become smart enough to ignore everything between a “# and the next space bar or something along those lines and use hashtags as true metadata.
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