[Web4lib] Twine: The Semantic Web is Here!

[Gerry Mckiernan]

***APOLOGIES FOR RECEIPT OF DUPLICATE POSTINGS***

Colleagues/

Our Facebook Friend Sarah Miller, a librarian at Illinois Wesleyan
University in Bloomington is interviewed in the Feb 3 2008  NYTimes
about Twine  "a revolutionary new way to share, organize, and find
information" [ http://www.twine.com/ ].

/Gerry

NYTimes |February 3, 2008 | Novelties

An Online Organizer That Helps Connect the Dots 
By ANNE EISENBERG
HOW often have you wasted time searching through page after page of
e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds and YouTube videos on your
computer, trying to find an important item?

If the answer is *too often,* a San Francisco company, Radar
Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, that
may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving
documents.

Twine (twine.com) can scan almost any electronic document for the names
of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its
algorithms recognize. 

Then it does something unusual: it automatically tags or marks all of
these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side
of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the
program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context.


Customers have individual accounts on Twine*s Web site, where they
save URLs or other information. They can make their collections, or
*twines,* private, share them in groups with other members having
common interests like politics or fashion, or even make the twines
public. 

[snip]

Twine is based on technologies created for the developing semantic Web
* foreseen as a smarter Web where machines may someday be able to
process the meaning of words and phrases in documents and even routinely
answer direct questions.

Sarah Miller, a librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University in
Bloomington, became a member of Twine*s test group in November, partly
because she and her husband, Ethan, a doctoral candidate, needed a place
to organize all the documents they wanted to share with each other about
teaching and learning.

For More Of The Story ... Visit 

[
http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/02/twine-semantic-web-is-here.html
]

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu  

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