6000 Delicious Links – in need of Automatic Text-tagging

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My public links in delicious.com have become 6000, today:

• http://delicious.com/omadeon

I’ve been collecting links since the beginning of 2007 and regularly use my account in  delicious.com for bookmarking any web-page, pdf, youtube video, or other URL that I find significant, coming across it, while surfing or searching. My total number of delicious links exceeds 10000, but I usually don’t make a link public unless I read it (or at least read a substantial part of it) to believe that it can be useful to others, too…

The problem is INFORMATION OVERLOAD. It’s perhaps the most important knowledge-management problem of our time: -We can not make sense of so much information, at least at the current… complexity level of our (undoubtedly still very primitive) Homo Sapiens brain!

Our current, extremely primitive level of evolution, viewed in the future, after certain… deliberately engineered human DNA species-enhancements, after only a few decades, may indeed look (to future generations) a bit like… this (looks to us) : 🙂

So, perhaps the only other way to understand so much data, is to use better forms of data organisation, based on meta-data (or information about information): This can consist of very simple enhancements like tagging, or more sophisticated ones like full-blown Semantic Web technology. If the latter is used to extract tags, if it succeeds it usually does a lot more: -The ultimate goal is semantic tagging and the automatic creation of Semantic (meta-)Structures of information, associated with any specific (human) text or web-page, anywhere…

Despite Semantic Web technology’s advances (and sites like OpenCalais that provide free API‘s for programmers) real practical progress in facilities available for ordinary internet users, as regards automatic text-tagging has been very poor and too slow, perhaps because of the generally poor knowledge of NLP techniques by most programmers. In theory, automatic tagging has progressed a lot, with research links here , but in practice there are many problems, while an increasing number of people ask questions about (how to do)  it, e.g. in this post.

You can now try out two free on-line automatic text-tagging services:

• TagThe.net – Webservice that tags your resources

• TagCrowd – make your own tag cloud from any text

As an example, here are some experimental tags extracted automatically out of my recent blog-post «Intellectual Dishonesty as defensiveness against Cognitive Dissonance (a Research Proposal for Gestalt Psychology)» by

(and  subsequently corrected by hand to remove some invalid entries):

beliefs brain cognitive contradictory defensiveness discomfort dishonesty dissonance form function fundamental gestalt human incomplete inconsistent information inner intellectual intelligent mind pattern pattern-completion people perception phenomenon positive psyche psychology sense swan

The same text tagged automatically by another automatic tagging service,

generated the following tags:

topic

Gestalts    mind    Dissonance    Cognitive    defensiveness    perception    pattern    Gestalt    discomfort    information

language

english

Last, but not least, I should mention the excellent free automatic tagging service offered by Zemanta, as a firefox plugin for bloggers (hat I’ve used already to… generate automatically most tags for THIS post):

• http://www.zemanta.com

Among my programming  interests is to develop automatic text-tagging software in Prolog (with Assembly language for speed). However, other obligations (in a scheduling project) as well as the absence of anyone’s… willingness to finance a project in tagging, not to mention… (admittedly) too much blogging (!) 🙂  have delayed this goal, for a long time; even though a lot of work has already been done, e.g. in the creation of merged semantic dictionaries and optimised  parsing.

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