Kingsley Idehen's Blog Data Space

Man this is interesting. Is Dave Winer getting into the idea of ontology merging? Read this comment and judge for yourself:

?The hierarchy itself is separate ? you (could) publish an OPML file of that hierarchy and put it in a public place.
In answering the question, ?Why do it this way?? Dave gave an interesting response ? the atomization of a blog into feeds would allow users to merge the ?my world? of their blog with content from the many ?their worlds? on the net. Such merged topical hierarchies could then themselves be exported as an OPML file and a defacto statement of ?this is my point of view, my information and other information from beyond my domain that I think is important.?

There?s a number of folk hard at work on this problem: the XFML folks, Paolo Valdemarin & Matt Mower on their k-collector, and our very own SWAD-E thesaurus project which discusses mapping issues . Heck, we even discussed the issue in our requirements specification. All at different levels of sophistication and complexity. I suspect that something as simple as blog categorization won't run into the really hard thesaurus mapping problems, but that it won?t be straightforward as Dave?s comments might lead one to think.

To expand on this theme, let?s think about how people might want to share categories. Firstly, you might want to simply reuse someone else?s categorization scheme. That?s fine as a bootstrap, but what if you already have a scheme? What if the 2 schemes overlap? What happens to your previously categorized blog entries? You might, I suggest, want at least the ability to say ?these two categories are the same?.
Then there?s the aggregation of categories. Without some sort of mapping, two blogs using different categorization schemes are just that ? 2 blogs.
A feasible approach is the decentralized ontology creation favoured by Topic Exchange and k-collector. Here, people suggest new topics/categories, and the (ever growing) structure is shared among the community. A fine idea, but one I fear is not scaleable beyond a very small community.
Finally, there is the idea of ?semantic lenses? ? using 2 different categorization schemes to view the same content.

Oh, one other thing. Reading on, I note ?Dave?s idea is that supporting views other than reverse-chron gives new participants entry points into the data?. I couldn?t agree more, this is what I was trying to demonstrate with semantic view, navigation and query on the semantic blogging prototype.