I recently read an interesting paper that was presented at the INSEMTIVE workshop (incentives for the semantic web). Hans-Jörg Happel addresses the problem that a lot of metadata (tags, annotations, etc.) exist in private knowledge spaces but are not shared on the semantic web – maybe because of privacy concerns, maybe because nobody has ever asked for them, whatever. His new idea is to design a search engine that knows which private metadata could improve the result set – and then asks their authors to publish them: i.e. the opposite of the “publish first, retrieve then” process of traditional IR.
Tags: annotation, search, semantic web