A good read: Paul W writes on automating CMS metadata
In a previous post I asked the question, “What if a web service could automatically provide the CMS metadata when you go to check-in a new topic?” In this post I’ll discuss why you would want to do that, some of the candidate technologies, and what is necessary to make it real.
The interesting back story to Paul’s new blog is this; while Paul writes about CMS metadata I was on the phone with him yesterday brainstorming about how the heck we are going to get more metadata into his blog? Being a new blog we have to pump up the Google juice as much as we can. While the best way of course is to keep writing and connecting with people it doesn’t hurt to add metadata to your blog. Here’s the rub; If you run your own server, like I do, you have much more control of your blogging software. I run Wordpress so I can experiment with the latest tools like Tagaroo or whatever comes along next that provides the Natural Language processing needed to suggest new tags that I can feed ito the semantic web. With Paul’s blog and others that use a hosted blogging service like Wordpress.com, Typepad or Blogger, you get only what the service provides you. It’s not your car so you can’t add those hot rod components. So in this case something like Tagaroo won’t work.
So the conversation starts to diverge at this point. But I ask which CMS systems are open and extensible extensible enough to allow for the next generation “beefed up” semantic gizmos to be bolted on as needed. For example simple tagging out of the box is good but rich RDF metadata is even better. So as better NLP services come along I’d like to be able to swap out the old parts and put in better ones. In my case I’ve already bolted on a plugin to generate SIOC metadata which gives me real RDF and FOAF on my site, and every post is processed with NLP from Calais (Tagaroo) Not to mention a new version of Calias is now out that I can be immediately plugged into. But I should be clear my point is that It’s not that these are better or worse than any other semantic solutions for my blog, it’s that I have the choice.
This leads to a broader and possibly more improtant conversation around open archtiectures and how they often come along with open source software. This why back a few years ago I switched from Movabale Type to Wordpress. The Wordpress plug in archtiecture is open and anyone with a good idea can get in on the game and we can all play.
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