OuRSS: a New Approach to Distributed Tagging ss Alan Oursland Robert Carter INF385T - Semantic Web5/1/2006

OverviewOverview Why Tag Feeds? Project Goals Project Ideas and Planning OuRSS: a Guided Tour Conclusions

Why Tag Feeds? Are you kidding? “According to Technorati data, there are about 75,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers -- people who write weblogs -- update their weblogs regularly; there are about 1.2 million posts daily, or about 50,000 blog updates an hour.” I --- About Technorati (

Why Tag Feeds? Of course, there are several web-based feed readers that allow tagging: Technorati Feedlounge Rojo Google Reader Gregarius News Alloy And one can always tag blogs and news items in Shadows or Del.icio.us. But…

Why Tag Feeds? But… The tag data gets locked into a proprietary system. Data transfer is difficult, or impossible The IMDb dilemma: who profits from my long hours of tagging?

Project Goals To create an application that can easily tag RSS feeds and share tags through a social network Tags are distributed : not locked in to one application Allows users to find relevant information

Project Ideas and Planning Let the user choose his/her feed reader A local application (JAVA) –Not tied to a specific web RSS aggregator Data published to a “metablog” Data gathered from other metablogs

Project Ideas and Planning Difficulties: –Too many feed schema; loose semantics The Informa Library provided a workable solution ( )

Collecting Feeds from the User’s Feed Reader

Adding Tags to an RSS item

Sharing Tags

Collecting Tags

The Next Level? Adding value for the user: more features for searching and organization –Using tags to organize one’s own feeds –A “metablog aggregator” to allow searching across the range of existing tags? –Applications of this distributed model beyond RSS?

Get OuRSS Download and installation instructions available at: s

References / Resources From course readings/discussion: –Turnbull, Don (2006) User-driven Semantics: Folksonomies & Tags (class PowerPoint and discussion). sw/presentations/Folksonomies_Tags.ppt –Golder, Scott A. and Bernardo A. Huberman. (2005) The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems. Retrieved April 18, 2006, from Semantic Web Spring Technologies 2006: Structure_Collaborative_Tagging_Systems.pdf –Guy, Marieke and Emma Tonkin. (2006) Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags? D-Lib Magazine, January Volume 12 Number 1. –Sauermann, Leo, Bernardi, A. and Dengel, A. (2005) Overview and Outlook on the Semantic Desktop. Semantic Desktop Workshop at 4th International Semantic Web Conference. Galway Ireland Semantic_Desktop.pdf

References / Resources Other readings: –Çelik, Tantek (2005, Jan 10). RelTag. Technorati Developers Wiki. Retrieved Apr 25, 2006, from Technorati Web site: –Gibson, Bud (2005, June 30). Distributed Tagging Hell. Retrieved April 29, 2006, from The Community Engine Web site: g.html#more –Schmuck, Niko. Informa: RSS Library for Java - Overview. Retrieved April 30, 2006, from