We are very proud to be among the posters that will be presented today in Pisa, at the prestigious 3th Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives Workshop (SWAP).

The SWAP is hosted at the Scuola Normale Superiore (probably one of the best faculties in Europe) and it aims to bring together researchers and participants interested in Semantic Web technologies.

Personally I wasn’t very positive about submitting the Facetag candidature to a semantic workshop. Facetag probably cannot be strictly considered a semantic web application (even if we wrote this term on the paper and the site www.facetag.org). This means we are easily exposed to strong criticism when facing people researching on ontologies and similar tools.

Our goal at the SWAP is anyway building a bridge, a middle ground as I love to name it. A bridge between the W3C semantic web and social software. Because this is both completely possible and needed.

Our approach with Facetag could be considered very pragmatical (even if the facets we use are inspirared by CRG and Ranganathan work). But I strongly believe that listening to user needs and being concrete is a necessary value today on the web.

Facetag tries to give an answer to a specific (but not limited) problem: how to access the large information spaces introduced by social applications in a powerful way.

I will report tomorrow about the feedbacks we got. Let’s hope to be back in one piece (academics can be very aggressive animals ).

Update: Semantics didn’t decide to eat us. We received a lot of interest with few important names (see Emma Tonkin) well impressed by Facetag. I hope this meeting will be the first brick of a long and lasting bridge between the web 2.0 phenomenon and the more academic semantic web discipline.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.