INDEXING/ANNOTATION

On Enriching the Commons

Background

In Critical Path Bucky Fuller made clear that:

• Our milieu (air/water/population) is responsive to our actions;
• Resources include gravity/light/metaphysics (the accumulation of lore);
• Humans seek to add to the latter through contributions to the Commons.

Certain of our institutions (e.g. Exclusivity and Insurance) are counter-productive to these goals.

Revealing the Structure of the Web

The traditional key to knowledge content is indexing by keywords. As we create an index to a book we don't simply list all its words. Deciding which to include in the index (and the Table of Contents) is an art making our commonly shared information rapidly/efficiently accessible/usable.

In general, Tagging, either through Taxonomies or methods such as RDF (Resource Description Framework), should underlie a Semantic Web.

To form a more perfect method, we have Folksonomies. These are sometimes represented visually (seldom semantically/accessibly) with Tag Clouds.

The ongoing growth of the Commons of Knowledge is in our hands. Providing indices/annotations/footnotes/critiques to material in the enormous database on our networks furthers access to and usability of this resource.

And that's a GOOD THING.