Tagora

No, it’s not Totoro’s cousin.

Tagora is a recently launched EU research project (STREP) exporing the “Semiotic dynamics” of SoSo. They will be using Bibsonomy as their testbed, which makes sense – given that the makers of Bibsonomy are project partners:

This research project is located at the interface of several fields, such as computer science, complex systems science, cognitive science, psycholinguistics and information architecture, and is likely to feed back into the design of better applications. The project will contribute to Semiotic Dynamics, a new field that studies how semiotic relations can originate, spread, and evolve over time in populations, by combining recent advances in linguistics and cognitive science with methodological and theoretical tools from complex systems and computer science.

The TAGora project aims at exploiting the unique opportunities offered by the increasing popularity of computer-mediated social interaction in a variety of contexts. Such popularity, in fact, is making available large amounts of raw data from online semiotic systems (for example, collaborative tagging systems) and these data may become the foundantion of a true scientific investigation about the behavior of human agents on the Web and the dynamics of information in online communities.

The project ultimately aims at creating a virtuous cycle between data analysis, modeling and theoretical constructions, with the ultimate goal of understanding, predicting and controlling the Semiotic Dynamics of online social systems.

Web2.1 (II)

Tribler is a p2p file-sharing tool which uses social networking to enhance quality & performance. While I haven’t tried it yet, or even read the paper, the concept is definetly called for. Most so-so tools have a very limited perception of ’social’. It’s usualy ‘me Tarazan you world’ or ‘me Tarazan you firends’, with no intermidiate levels. In the real world, I call my mum for recipies and my dad for car advice, but wouldn’t bother sharing a video with niether (unless its a home video of their grandchildren, which I wouldn’t want to share with anyone else). Its about time systems started reflecting these basic principles of social life!

Oh, and the reason they get a ‘Web2.1′ tag is that they’re also working on tag navigation and mob ranking.

Anyway – if anyone gives them a spin, do leave a comment here!

Netscape goes too-oh

The die-hard of the web is making an interesting attempt to re-position itself as nu-media. CNet is impressed, but Digg users are (suprise, suprise) not. 

Maybe they should have a look at BBC's reboot. 

Notes on Ramos et al’s Swarm intelligence

I find this week's paper interestingly related to Jaron Lanier's essay (for which we should thank Phillip). I take several ideas from Ramos et al. First, the basic phenomena of distributed intelligence, whether distribution is among organisms or neurons. As they phrase is - 

"The answer is somewhere spread in the dynamics and interactions among several units of the system, not on the units itself." (p 4)

Then comes the question of where does intelligence emerge. As Lanier's eloquently observers, the hive mind can be as stupid as the most stupid individual. Ramos et al suggest that what is needed is a very delicate balance of positive and negative feedback, Stigmergic memory and evaporation (forgetfulness), with the right dose of random behaviour. Where is that balance?

Intelligence lives on the edge of chaos.

Last, I find the notion of Stigmergy fascinating. Wikipedia defines it (today) as: 

"Stigmergy is a method of communication in emergent systems in which the individual parts of the system communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. Stigmergy was first observed in nature – ants communicate to one another by laying down pheromones along their trails, so where ants go within and around their ant colony is a stigmergic system. Similar phenomena are easily seen in many (all?) eusocial creatures, such as termites, who use pheromones to build their very complex nests by following a simple decentralized rule set. Each insect scoops up a 'mudball' or similar material from its environment, invests the ball with pheromones, and deposits it on the ground. Termites are attracted to their nestmates' pheromones and are therefore more likely to drop their own mudballs near their neighbors'. Over time this leads to the construction of pillars, arches, tunnels and chambers."

Are Tags and trackbacks our pheromone trails?

The dark side

The new scientist warns us that the NSA is working on ways to harvest intelligence from social networks. Which brings me backto Mika's paper, but with a new, and dark, perspective. Knowledge mining in so-so can generate semantic networks, but as Mika shows it is also powerful at mapping people to ideas. I always thought of this as a good thing – it will allow like-minded people to connect, and form focused cells of creative activity. Well, that just shows how naive I am. Of course, it will also allow like minded bad people to connect and think of clever ways of being bad. It will also allow people who think its there business to know what everyone else is thinking about and tell them to stop to be more efficient about their job.

What can we do about it? not much, probably, other than make sure we live in a strong democracy. And I mean strong.

Since you can't stop governments from knowing everything about you, your only protection is to demand that you know everything about them.

The world’s first integrated brower and server-based PLE?

In our first workshop meeting I wondered if we might build a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) for ourselves using only web-based components, i.e servers out there. I spent a bit of time yesterday and today doing just that, and provided an integration mechanism to act across different sites by hacking up a tool to harvest and reuse tags. This may be the world's first integrated PLE that is based on a browser and diverse web severs.

The idea of a PLE built using a browser and web servers is not new: There are plenty of posts out there in the Blogosphere about this. Here is one:

"Why do we need a PLE when we already have the Internet? The Internet is my PLE, ePortfolio, VLE what ever. Thanks to blogger, bloglines, flickr, delicious, wikispaces, ourmedia, creative commons, and what ever comes next in this new Internet age, I have a strong online ID and very extensive and personalised learning environment."

Leigh Blackall here

I'll start building up further information on this idea here.

Our focus on tagging started me thinking about how tags might glue together the diverse services and create a browser based PLE that utilises diverse we sites out there on the web. My own experiences with tags had already led me to the wish for some kind of tag server which served up my favorite and possibly 'somewhat standardised' tags. 'Somewhat standardised' means, as you can guess, my own personal collection of tags I would like to use. A way of harvesting tags off web sites would also be useful, so as to build up my collection of tags I like.

We might also call this the half-hour PLE, because it could be implemented in just a half hour. In truth I had to be a bit round about and do a few techie things which made the task a bit longer — add two hours to load up easyPHP and learn enough PHP (a web programming language) and mySQL (a database system) to implement my glue, the web site which appears in sidebar.
All of this is hung together using the FireFox Browser, which had a handy tool bar for favorite links. I started by getting rid of most of my collection of toolbar links; many of them had just gathered there for historical reasons and were largely unused — how often do I go to the ordinance survey site to find a free topographic map segment?

I set up the toolbar to look like this (click on the image to see it larger)

In the lower toolbar, there are a bunch of vertical bars which respectively group together different resources on the web, from left to right:

• My own resources for email, blogging, using elgg, my own wiki (which runs on my laptop and is only for my own use), and my own entries in bibsonomy
• Resources for one of my spheres of interest, the LKL Knowledge and Social Software workshop series
• Resources for another sphere of interest, the VLE I use when I teach a course on Interactive System Design Methods.
• Resources that are useful to me. The RSS folder provides a drop down menu of RSS feeds I find useful, in this first version the feeds are for the LKL KSS blog, wiki and bibsonomy. This feature is useful, I can easily check, in one place, what recent changes have happened on sites that I find interesting. The second folder drops down bookmarks which are not central to my PLE, but are somewhat useful to me, so for example I parked the Ordinance Survey bookmark here.
• Finally there is a bookmark entitled tags; clicking on this enables me to generate the left hand sidebar you can see in the Firefox window.

Gluing the constituent sites together

The only reason why I call this an integrated system for dealing with diverse learning related sites is that I provide myself with a mechanism for easy collection and (re-)use of tags. Because of the centrality of tags in the kinds of sites I want to use in my PLE, I want a quick and easy way of dealing with them. All I have here is a little website (for now hosted on the laptop running my browser), where I can enter a tag in the text input field, hit submit, and have that tab stored in a database. Typically, I won't even bother to type in a tag, rather just copy it off an existing page using cut and paste. (In fact, in the screen grab, I had just 'harvested' the tags folksonomy, learning, lkl-kss, PLE from the main lkl-kss BibSonomy page.) Then in tagging something new, if tags are entered via text, I can just copy and paste tags from my 'tagster' sidebar to the requisite tag text field on the page that I am using for tagging.

Tagster sidebar variants are possible, one could have a multiple users system that includes groups, each user and group having their own favoured tag sets. One could then display in the sidebar, for example, one's own favoured tag-set, augmented/merged with a tag-set for another user or group when dealing with things of interest beyond ones normal spheres of interest.

Analysis

This configuration has only been together for a few hours, so its clearly experimental. Already I find myself using the toolbar bookmarks quite heavily, together with multiple tabs in Firefox's page display area.

The tagster sidebar seems as though it will have applications when adding new entries elsewhere, I'll leave a comment as to how I am getting on with it.

Simple though the ideas may be, I feel as though this is an integrated environment.

• Resources which are important to me are grouped together (which is also important) in the toolbar, and I can reach them easily. My middle mouse button opens them in new tabs in the browser so that I can easily juxtapose and switch between information in different tags.
• I can have different spheres of interest represented in the toolbar and reach them. One concern is that my toolbar may overflow with spheres of interest, and this might have to be dealt with by providing FireFox with a special toolbar that switches context between different spheres of interest.
• Having RSS feeds in one place seems more convenient that the mechanism we were using of showing them in the wiki.
• There is a place to hang other resources, under resources in the toolbar.
• The tagster sidebar gets over many of my 'oh what did I start calling this' problem with tagging. I think that this facility will grow over time: I like the idea of having my own tags augmented by others' tags, including those of special interest groups like ourselves. I could imagine a tagster tool being able to interrogate sites like bibsonomy and delicious as to potential tags, filtering them, and so on…
• Much of this is a testament toFirefox's flexibility. particularly, I make the tagster sidebar appear from clicking on the toolbar icon by pre-configuring the bookmark via its properties to display in the sidebar, creating that sidebar if it is not already there. The action is easily reversible, I can close the sidebar at will.

It's surprisingly easy to build a PLE like this. In comparison, I was part of a team which spent about two person years doing complex and intricate hacking in order to part-implement a PLE (I wasn't doing the intricate hacking though, just keeping the project working). CETIS are involved, again with a lot of hacking, in implementing a PLE, called PLEX, on top of the Eclipse framework. Both projects have their merits, I particularly like PLEX's ideas for handling friends-of-friends and activities.

But somehow I feel that I am spot-on in constructing this assemblage of sites with its tagster glue mechanism, the system is very much under my own control, and it is highly personal, adapted to my needs. Both of these, I feel are essential attributes of PLEs. Time will tell how good this system is, but certainly the basis (bar a public tagster) is out there for anyone wanting a quick customised PLE.

However, there are some limitations. For example, if I want to use a wiki provide a lengthy book review of a book whose reference I make available in bibsonomy, then I would have to manually embed a URL to the review in the descriptive text that accompanies the bibsonomy reference. At the moment I have no idea of how limiting this is in general; if I was a student using this PLE I would have to know a bit about what I could do with URLs — how to copy the URL for the review page, the fact that I could insert it in text elswhree, and that I or someone else might have to copy and paste that URL into the URL field for a browser in order to find the review from the bibsonomy entry.

LKL-KSS

If there is interest, I may implement a tagster for us all on a publicly available server. Certainly, if you use some less customisable browser, I can get you started with setting up your FireFox toolbar bookmarks.

Tag Hierarchies

While Mika is trying to mine ontologies out of folksonomies, Paul Haymann has an algorithm to extract hierarchies.

I’m a social scientist. get me out of here!

I suspect some of may have found the use of matrix arithmetic and graph theory in this week's paper a bit overwhelming. I still think its a paper worth reading. First, its good to know that there's more to Matrixes than Morpheus. Second, its interesting to see how people are trying to fit formal models to intuitions.

So lets focus on the intuitions. As a first aid measure, try applying masking tape (preferably purple) to every paragraph that has squigly brackets, and see how it's already become more friendly.

Now lets talk about hypergraphs. This here picture shows Actors (AKA users or plain people), instances (AKA resources, documents or web pages) and concepts (AKA words, tags, categories).

When a person tags a page, she creates a triparty relationship between person, tag and page. Mika calls this a hyperedge. I draw a triangle.

When many people do the same to many pages with many tags, you get what Mika calls a hypergraph, and would probably be refered to in plain English as a 'pretty big mess' (not to be confused with a mesh).

So what do mathematicians do with big messy problems? They find a way to break them down to many small less messy problems. In the case at hand, we do so by looking only at one type of connection at a time, say the dotted lines (tag – page) and measuring it along another (say number of persons). So, we get nice and simple graphs that connect only tags (concepts) by counting the number of things they have in common. For example, if a lot of pages are tagged 'sex' and 'table' we induce there's a semantic connection between the two.

As Mika explains:

In words, the bipartite graph AC links the persons to the concepts that they have used for tagging at least one object. Each link is weighted by the number oftimes the person has used that concept as a tag. This kind of graph is known in the social network analysis literature as an afiliation network [7], linking people to affliations with weights corresponding to the strength of the afiliation. An afiliation network can be used to generate two simple, weighted graphs (onemodenetworks) showing the similarities between actors and events, respectively. (At this point it is recommended to dichotomize the graph by applying somethreshold.)

…

In summary, the AC graph, the a±liation network of people and concepts can be folded into two graphs: a social network of users based on overlappingsets of objects and a lightweight ontology of concepts based on overlapping setsof communities. Thus in this simple model, social networks and semantics are just flip-sides of the same coin: the original bipartite graph contains all theinformation to generate these networks, while it it not possible to re-generatethe original graph from them.

Mika compares two ontologies (= networks of concepts) derived in this process. One links concepts by the number of people who use them together, the other by the number of pages they are mutualy associated with. It turns out that looking at peopls (communities) is a better way to discover semantic relationships than looking at objects. In other words, the same resource means different things to different people, but people in the same community share a common set of meanings.

Well, I think Wenger and Lave would be pleased to hear this.

But there are other networks that can be derived. By fixing the concepts, we can plot the potential social relationships, common interests or implicit communities. Which brings us back to Lyndsay's point. If a tagging system wants to survive its own growth, perhaps it should make these networks explict. For example, identify clusters, show them to me, and show prioretize resources tagged by people who share my social cluster.

Categories are ‘tags’

Thanks for that, Yish, I’ve been wondering how to add ‘tags’ to my own blog for ages. I’ve been using a wordpress blog for about a year and I never really understood what the categories were for. It’s good that the workshop series really is a place to learn as well as to think.

If you want to know more, there’s an interesting commentary on tags and tagging at Wired.

Thinking on Carey’s latest email and ideas about memory – I don’t know why – but somehow, whenever I get to thinking about tagging, I also start to think about memory and the idea of ‘traces’ (of knowledge, information, etc.).