The Semantic Web, Ben says entertainingly, isn’t going to happen because the Web is too messy. So what does already have the data that’s required? A mailing list. Tons of metadata already there.

With threadsML (yeah!) you can capture threads. It’s “RSS 1.0 with extra toys.” It includes some Dublin Core metadata (metadata standard for documents). “Mod threading” lets you point to things that are children of the object.

This addresses the obsolescence of conversations.

The killer problem is: Subjects (topics). Why? Because subject lines are often not related to the topic. A solution is to adopt one of the topic hierarchies, e.g., Yahoo or Dmoz. But they’re culturally relative and brittle. An alternative is to create your own hierarchical ontology. E.g., Easy News Topics for RSS 2.0 (RSS 2.0 is RSS without the RDF components.) ENT was created by Matt Mower and Paolo Valdemarin. ENT points to a topic map and lets you specify a topic within the message. Matt and Paolo have today released an aggregator that reads the ENT topics. But Ben’s not sure how it’s going to work because even simple threads get long lists of topics.

What do you do about the proliferation of classification systems? When someone links A to B, the software can look up the topics that B declares, and it can assume that that’s a vote for saying that the topic of A is similar to the topic of B. [Interesting. This would work across languages.]

Marc Canter, who helped revive interest in threadsML, asks what are the benefits of having this sort of thing. Audience suggestions:

– Move threads from email to discussion boards to wiki, etc.

– Do it on one computer, moving between email systems, etc.

– Query it

– Handle not just text

– Link threads so the “backstory” is available

– Use email interface to read blogs, wikis, mailing list archives

– Connect reviews

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(Disclosure: I’ve been involved with threadsML since the beginning, so I’m pretty stoked about this session. In fact, do a whois on threadsml.com… :)

Categories: Uncategorized dw