Zotero and the Practical Semantic Web
Was reading this first look at Zotero and nodding my head in agreement at these two suggestions:
when adding tags, should have a lookup table so you can select one that you’ve already used (good for consistency).
nice to have a way of browsing by tag (as in del.icio.us), probably over in the lefthand panel.
Having been talking to the Zotero guys about this very issue, I actually was thinking about taking this even further. I’d put the requirement more generally, then, to say that Zotero ought to make it easy for users to have consistent tags, and for them to easily access data by those tags.
At some point, the Zotero team wants to have a server, and to offer services tied into that. They’ve got a new domain name, which makes it a perfect platform on which to build semantic web functionality.
Tags as they have been used in the past few years are convenient, for example, but also problematic. As above, a single user may inconsistently use different strings to represent the same concept. If you scale this to multiple users, potentially working in multiple languages, this becomes somewhat of a mess of tags.
What if instead tags got normalized such that user gets auto-complete tags, and when assigning a tag, they are tied to a URI internally?
Firefox 2 (on which Zotero is based) already has auto-complete searching, so there’s some infrastructure to build just this sort of smart support. From the perspective of a user, it can be as simple as entering plain strings, but it makes their data more consistent. More importantly, it makes their data more consistent with other users’ data, thus opening up some powerful possibilities of data merging and such.
The same can, and should, be done for other key citation objects. Zotero is in fact a perfect opportunity to realize a more semantic web.
