The first annual Antonio Pizzigati Prize for “Software in the Public Interest“ is going to be awarded later this month. In 2006, the Pizzigati Prize will award $10,000 to one individual who has created or led an effort to create a software product of significant value to the nonprofit sector. This is a really exciting development in the world of free software/open source/social source. Kudos to the Tides foundation for organizing it!!
The WagN project we blogged about last month is one of the 6 finalists for the prize. Please feel warmly welcomed to join me in supporting Ethan McCutchen and the WagN team at the peer review forum that the Tides foundation has set up for the 6 finalists.
WagN is revolutionary. It doesn’t just make the same old tasks slightly easier … it makes entirely new applications possible!
Structured data is really really important! Consider a document on the web that is written in English. The semantics (meanings) of English words and the rules of grammar for English provide structure for the document. That structure allows someone who has never encountered the document to read it and understand what it means. Without structure that both author and reader can extract meaning from, that document would be worthless.
Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding an organization that serves battered women, writing a review of Ford’s workplace conditions, or searching for the greenest computer and buying it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines.
Computers are considerably bad at extracting meaning from English documents. So bad, that additional structure needs to be added to information to make it meaningful for computers.
When an organization wants to make information available in a format that a computer can understand, they traditionally have to resort to a relational database or specialized markup. The considerable weaknesses of these approaches include the following:
* Esoteric … only highly trained specialists can understand how the data is represented and modify that representation.
* Inflexible … special “human level” interfaces have to be cobbled onto the top of the database. These forms can only be changed by specialists.
Shoe-string operations in start-up mode simply don’t have the resources to create data that is computer-meaningful. This impedance mismatch between computers and ordinary folks is an old story that many a large project has tried to address. Most of these projects that have been going on for decades are still esoteric and inaccessible to ordinary folks.
This is where WagN enters the stage.
WagN provides a simple, flexible, and highly “human” accessible means to structure data in a form that computers can understand. In the years that I’ve been following developments in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding, I haven’t come across anything as fresh and promising as WagN.
WagN hits the bullseye between human and computer accessibility of information. I’m confident that the world will look back on the development of semantic tagging for wikis as a watershed moment akin to the development of the web itself.
Keep on Rockin’ Ethan and team!!
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