My first experiences with Twine

Today finally I logged in to Twine the first time. I was reading yesterday about some shortcomings of the system, so I was keen on trying out the system by myself to get my own impression.

It´s true that the system isn´t as easy to understand as del.icio.us or other bookmarking tools. It takes a while until you get used to all those additional ways you can navigate through the system. Remember: “Twine looks at content and parses it automatically for the names of people, places, organizations and other subject tags. Users are then able to navigate between related content, view recommended content and connect with recommended people with related interests.” – But the “shortcoming” mentioned by Marshall Kirkpatrick that “… it’s hard to keep track of all the levels and types of information available” I can´t agree with: This has only to do with a general problem, which arises whenever semantic technologies should enhance the user experience. Either you stay with “simple” user-interfaces like Google or del.icio.us or you spend 5 minutes or so to learn a new piece of software which will help you to save time in the future and which helps you to find related information automatically.
On the other hand I was very surprised, that the automatic recommendations Twine makes on how to annotate or describe a new resource is really unsatisfying. Users will only spend time to tag their bookmarks if the machine comes up with some intelligent suggestions. And it´s true, as Marshall says, “most of the web is made up of ugly, non-standard pages.”

So hopefully Twine will add that feature before it will open up to the public (isn´t there a plan to integrate OpenCalais or something similar?), otherwise there will be no “first mainstream semantic web application” but only another prototype of a yet another semweb-app.

OpenCalais will become an essential part of the Semantic Web

Really large companies start to spur the semantic web. Reuters has recently launched a semantic web service which is free also for commercial purposes. It helps to extract significant phrases from any unstructured text (web documents or office documents). This new service is called “OpenCalais” and is based on ClearForest text-analytics solutions (which was acquired by Reuters in 2007). So finally a dream comes true: Web content can be tagged automatically in quite a high quality. Technically spoken: Any unstructured text can be transformed into an RDF-graph on the fly, important phrases or even statements can be extracted from plain text.

OpenCalais is the core service for many new web applications and most of them will deal with better search functionalities or will also help to identify similarities between different types of content. For instance, for any document which is published on a web site related blogs or videos (or whatever) can be retrieved and presented as relevant context information.

Whenever an application will use OpenCalais content will be delivered to Reuters. Thus, submitting a URL has a different meaning in the future than it had all the years before: It´s not only about “promoting” a website anymore, it´s rather about examining ways to get connected with the semantic web – and about teaching Reuter´s global knowledge base

Try it out!