I've just read this article by Downes called "Semantic Networks and Social Networks". There's an academic slant to it, but that's no bad thing as he manages to compress into very few words so many areas of discussion pertinent to our domain that I don't really know where to start. Lets say he covers nodes, community, indduals, semantic web, Tim Berners-Lee, RDF, ontologies, XML. Learning Objects, DOI's, RSS, DC, Creative Commons, Taxonomy, identity2.0 (this presentation by Dick Hardt has been doing the rounds at Talis recently - if you want to pass 15 mins in awe, check it out), FOAF, authentication, Clay Shirkey...you get my drift.
The overall thrust of the article is that semantic networks and social networks have developed on the web in isolation, and these need to be more explicitly linked in what he terms the SNN (Semantic Social Network). This is about, bottom line, relating personal information and resource information in more formalised, structured way.
I've not considered this yet, so don't have much meaningful to add. My first impression is that Talis are very focussed on content (i.e. resource) description, but people like Ian Davies are now adding this layer of identity to our debate. Indeed, authentication and authorisation has been part of the library debate for a while - we're just no closer to solving the real problems these create. Maybe the answer lies somewhere in bringing the social network (people) and semantic (resources) into a tighter mesh. I touched on this when I was talking about folksonomies, and globalisation, where I discussed belonging to different "villages".
I feel its time I started to widen my thinking.
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