CommonTag Blog

A year ago initial thoughts were exchanged. The theme was simple: what is the easiest way for publishers to mark-up their content to make it more valuable? And what kind of value can they get?

Semantic web promises havens. The promise of machines understanding the data and acting on it semi-autonomously. But how do we get there? Not many are willing to put in a lot of work into publishing data in new formats. For the benefit that might or might not come years after enormous resources will be spent?

So why not start with something easy, say tagging? Marking up text with exactly defined concepts.

The ingredients are all out there:

• Tagging is old, people know what it is
  
• Common concepts are out there (Freebase, DBPedia)
• The standard for mixing HTML with other information is ready (RDFa)
• There are companies willing to implement it

Yes, similar ideas have been proposed before. But this time they come from sites actually willing to implement it over their data/services!

So we started to work, created ultra-simple standard (by semantic measures), and  supported it in our services from day one. And more software is on the way.

Our mission is to bring value to you when you Common Tag your content. You are invited to join the fun!

Related articles by Zemanta

• What is the Semantic Web (slideshare.net)
• Understanding the New Web Era: Web 3.0, Linked Data, Semantic Web (readwriteweb.com)