Beyond the Button

TwineMany of us in the museum world have been thinking about the "semantic web" for a long time. Scientists and educators alike need a more natural and standardized way of linking all the knowledge about different topics out there together. However the discussion around these tools is inherently academic and suffers from a serious popularity problem. Ask a few science educators about initiatives like the NSDL (The National Science Digital Library), Dublin Core Meta-Data, or The Internet Scout Project's CWIS system and you will get some seriously blank looks. For any of the heralded benefits of the semantic web to take hold we need a killer app that appeals to a wide range of users including science educators.

Nova Spivack thinks that his soon to launch web app Twine will be just this, "the first mainstream Semantic Web application." I haven't been able to check out Twine first hand yet but it looks pretty rad from reviews and screenshots.

From what I can tell it will be a tool for teams of people to build knowledge networks like on a wiki. However, tools will help you "tie it all together" using concepts that librarians will love from the semantic web and learning artificial intelligence systems. Who knows how this will actually take off but I get excited any time I see a useful tool start to bubble up on the popular media sites that talks about the nerdy world o the semantic web. I'll report here when I get an invite to join their beta test.