Zemanta: another channel for Europeana content?

OK there are several ways I could frame this post, but obviously one is that here is another opportunity for Europeana to channel its content.

So what is Zemanta? Well TechCrunch just wrote about the launch of its public API, and from what they say Zemanta is looks to be amongst a burgeoning sector of semantic enhancement tools - another with an API announcement this week was uClassify, and you can also look to OpenCalais, Hakia, AdaptiveBlue's BlueOrganizer and others including Yahoo!. These are tools that take in (text) content, analyise it, and identify entities within or characteristics of that text. These might be embedded into the text, or returned as recommendations, classifications, or links to related material. Sometimes we're talking about a machine-facing service, sometimes an end-user one e.g. the BlueOrganizer plugin. With Hakia and Yahoo!, these are services built on the power of their search engines. Zemanta sounds like it's squarely in this area, digesting content and returning links, images, keywords etc. from a database including (of course) Wikipedia, Amazon and Flickr. Looks like it's a plugin too.
uClassify is a little different - it learns to classify your text as you train it. I'm characterising it as a semantic enhancement technology but that may not be right in a strict sense. In any case, it will "enrich" the content you submit by putting it into categories you've assigned. That said, when I used oFaust, one of the apps built on top of its API, it took my snippet of Moby Dick and told me it was like Edgar Allen Poe, but needed work! Hmm. Whether that was down to the classifier or the training, though, I don't know.
So to go back to how Zemanta might fit in with Europeana, it's basically that we could work with them to digest our content and create relevant links to Europeana's vast (hopefully) and authoritative collection of cultural heritage content: artefacts, media, documents, people, events, and places. This is where I expect it helps to be big and standardised, as it should be easier for companies like Zemanta to work with one provider of cultural heritage content than with thousands of museums, libraries and archives.
To read more about Europeana (formerly EDL) check out my earlier posts: Europeana and EDL

Showing us the way

I presume it's uncontroversial to say that it would be useful to have terminologies available as web services. Right now, you can browse various sources of reference terms that are useful to museums (amongst others): sources like the british & irish archaeological bibliography (including its approved term lists); the National Monument Record Thesauri; and the museum codes and SPECTRUM terminology termbank maintained by the Collections Trust (to highlight some UK examples). I'm certain it would be useful to have these available as web services (some more so than others); likewise other thesauri that AFAIK aren't available to programme to: ULAN and AAT, for example, which are collected under the CCO initiative.

There's every chance that I misunderstand some or all of these "services" in terms of how they're used and by whom (I'm very shaky on the status of CCO and its relationship to AAT, for a start). But I'm sure that there are many ways in which a programmatic interface to their contents could be used. Which is why (to get to the point of this post) the service that OCLC's top geeks have come up with here is a great example for us in the museum world to look at (blogged here on Hanging Together). This is a collection of esssentially library-related thesauri onto which they have created web services. I like the look of FAST best of all; it could be really useful for us in the dusty bones world too.

Lorcan Dempsey also blogs today about the WorldCat identities API and other cool services. I fancy the name look-up service: aside from anything else it gives us a URL to refer to for those individuals in the WorldCat database. Here's a not-so-random entry.


So once again we can learn a lot from libraries leading the way. One of the cool things, though, is that OCLC are a cross-domain organisation, and people like Dempsey think constantly about breaking down the barriers between libraries, archives and museums. If they've sprinkled their magic onto library terminologies, I'm sure they'll be only too happy to help the museum world to take similar steps.

AdaptiveBlue offers AB Meta. Did the earth move for you?

AdaptiveBlue is an interesting company. Although I've not found myself using their Blue Organiser tool all that much myself, I can see which way they're pointing and I like it. Now they have announced how they wish to refresh of the old familiar META tags in the heads of web pages with their take on object-centric metadata. AB Meta (apparently developed with other web companies) is all about surfacing semantic data into the layer that we typically interact with, and that even non-tech people can hopefully author without too much trouble. From their page:

AB Meta is a simple and open format for annotating pages that are about things.

A book publisher can use AB Meta to provide information about a book such as the author and ISBN, a restaurant owner can provide information such as the cuisine, phone number and address and a movie reviewer can annotate reviews with movie titles and directors.

The format allows site owners to describe the main thing on the HTML page in a very simple way - using standard META headers. AB Meta is purposefully simple and understandable by anyone. AB Meta is based on eRDF Standard.

I'm especially interested in this "surface" expression/implementation of SW. It's clear to me that much of the running in recent times has been made by companies looking to SW-style concepts and aspirations to deliver real benefits to their business, and only in a few cases has this led to them taking a classic-ish SW path (c.f. Reuters with OpenCalais). AdaptiveBlue and many others have instead set out along the light-weight, near-the-surface route, and as an eternal optimist (for some reason), I am hopeful that this will ultimately deliver the meat that the heavy-weight, deep SW needs to do something exciting. Thus killing the chicken/egg situation, with pay-offs along the way. This was the real take-home for me of last year's SW think tank.

Whether AB Meta has a part in this for museums I can't say. It's certainly lightweight but whether it will be different enough from existing alternatives to persuade our sector to adopt it, I don't know. Perhaps the earth will yet move.

As a PS, I should add that I dropped them a line to ask about a detail (whether it would be possible to include more than one object in the head of a page) and the reply came from CEO Alex Iskold. I think that's pretty impressive: presumably he's a busy guy (and he writes a good blog post, too) and yet he took the time to reply to a pretty pedestrian inquiry.

Odds and sods 2

A couple of really interesting links from today:

• From hand-crafted to mass digitized by Gunter Waibel at Hanging Together. There's loads I identify with in these summarised remarks, and a fair bit to argue with. An evolving discussion on the balance between the practical, the ideal, and the flexible. Gunter also wrote recently about the environment in which LAMs operate, pointing to Lawrence Lessig's "modalities of constraint" - factors regulating behaviour. The latter fits nicely into the paper I'm writing, at least if I can work through the 32 odd pages of this reference.
• Where Do We Put It? Fitting the Web Into Museums from Nina Simon (on Museum 2.0) pointed me to this thesis by Karen A. Verschooren. Fascinating thinking and material on internet art, much of which logic can probably be applied beyond that precise field and onto other museum digital resources. I'll have to read another 200 pages or so to confirm this, but it looks promising! Nina's post in interesting in itself for its response to the thesis. I'd like to do them both justice here but it will have to wait.