Yaron is Writing

Two notable sites have popped up recently that use my Semantic Forms extension to enable collaborative editing of data, pretty much on opposite ends of the spectrum.

First, the FEMA Region III Levee Accreditation Knowledgebase, which is currently being assessed by various people at FEMA’s “Region III”, which is essentially the mid-Atlantic states of the United States, as a possible system for recording the readiness of levees. Post-Hurricane Katrina, the state of the nation’s levees has obviously become much more portentous, and the fact that my technology could become part of the solution is thrilling.

The other site is the delightfully crassly-named Chickipedia, a wiki for information about attractive female celebrities. Launched by Break.com about two weeks ago, this is by far the highest-profile site so far to use Semantic Forms. The interesting thing is that, of all the many write-ups the site has gotten online, none have indicated awareness of the semantic technology that powers it, or the fact that, unlike Wikipedia (which it deliberately compares itself to) it provides forms for entering content; instead the focus has been, perhaps understandably, on the, er, ample content. On the whole, that’s fine by me, since my goal in the extensions I’ve created has always been to make the underlying semantic technology as invisible as possible. It’s true that it would be nice to get more recognition of the technology, although I suppose that’s what I’m helping to do now.

So, those are the two big new sites; I like the Apollonian/Dionysian, James Bond-esque duality of it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 12:45 am and is filed under Semantic wikis, Semantic Forms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.