Help:Semantic tagging

Help:Contents

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See also Help:Annotation for more detailed background information on semantic tags. Refer to the Attributes or Relations lists to see examples of existing tags or check whether specific annotations are already in use.

Overview

Centiare's semantic tagging capabilities provide it with the unique capability of facilitating construction of dynamic "on-the-fly" database applications. That is, not only do semantic tags provide machine readable search engine reference information, but they also allow users to develop on-line database applications like this example.

Summary

Almost all of the semantic tagging that's taking place in Centiare will fall into two types of scenarios -- Relations and Attributes.

Suppose you were writing an article about the city of Berlin, Germany. You could easily type out in the article that "Berlin is the capital of the unified country of Germany, and there are nearly 3.4 million people living in its metropolitan area." That's really good encyclopedia information.

However, if someone searches for the exact phrase "capital of Germany" or "population of Berlin", your sentence that happens to answer both of those questions would not be returned by either of those particular text searches. What we hope to see in Centiare is active use of the semantic tagging process, so that such information is more likely to be found -- by either humans typing in commands, or machines programmed to find information.

So, the essence of semantic tagging is, somewhere in the Berlin article text, or in an infobox, or even in an addendum at the bottom of the article, if you want to create a semantic link that describes a "capital-relationship", this is done by writing:

[[capital of::Germany]]

Note the use of two (2) colons in succession. You've just created a semantic tag Relation.

Furthermore, if you want to create a semantic link that describes a "population-attribute", this is done by writing:

[[population:=3396990]]

Note the use of the colon and equal sign in succession. You've just created a semantic tag Attribute. (By the way, don't add commas to population; this attribute has a Type:Integer, which means it will be displayed as 3,396,990.)

Custom Tags

Consult first with Snerfling before attempting to create any custom attributes and/or relations. There may be tags already in place to fit your needs; if new tags are needed for a specific application, seek assistance in proper design and utilization.

Incorrectly designed and/or documented tags are subject to deletion.

Ordinal Attributes

There are many advantages to using ordinal identifiers (Centiare convention is numbers) to further differentiate between certain related attributes.

The two general cases are:

• When attribute values are variable/non-standard e.g. job titles vs movie titles, which means one searches on attributes themselves, not attribute values. In other words, while job titles may vary between different key people, such as president, vice-president, director, etc., there is only one (the original) "Gone With the Wind". Here's an example from the attributes list:

Key Person1 Title
Key Person2 Title

• When attributes have relations to other attributes e.g. key person <-> job title. Expanding upon the example shown above, job titles can be associated with the respective individuals who hold those positions:

Key Person1
Key Person1 Title
Key Person2
Key Person2 Title
Key Person3
Key Person3 Title
Key Person4
Key Person4 Title

In this way, professional associations don't normally require ordinal identifiers, unless at some point there are secondary attribute relations. For example association <-> committee, association <-> year joined, etc.

Relations

Relations link pages; as such, they have built in ordinal aspects. That is, there already exists a 1:1 relationship between pages. This is extremely useful when considering complex tags which may have multiple reference points. In these cases, it may be better to provide actual page references via relations and let the respective pages provide the subject matter details.

The cross-over point between attributes & relations is where topics/subjects warrant individual pages. For example, individuals may have multiple degrees. The question arises as to whether it is better to have ordinal attributes or relations. In this case, it is preferable to have ordinal attributes because a relation to page labeled "Bachelors Degree" provides limited utility.

Concepts such as subject interests can also be semantically tagged as relations, since common Directory or Main pages can be interlinked to multiple users via ASK queries (see Skiing for an example).

Standards

Centiare is beginning to standardize the use of tags in certain specified areas. It is expected these guidelines will be used to form a consistent approach towards classifying information to increase both usability and searching.

• Entertainment Annotation
• Books & References Annotation

Search Queries

Centiare uses a parser function called ASK to perform free-form queries. ASK provides a ready complement to the Search Triple query-by-form facility.

When people use the "Search Triple" feature in Centiare, they will have utmost confidence and success in finding the articles they are looking for, if they correctly use the search forms, and you've correctly tagged your articles for semantic searching.

The possibilities for this are literally limitless, for both businesses and individuals. Imagine conducting a search for a male, born in Michigan between 1965 and 1968, who has interests in both skiing and poker. Do you think that would be easy with MySpace, Wikipedia, or Google? Fat chance. But on Centiare, it will be a piece of cake, if you learn to use the ASK function.