(2003-12-01) Harpers Ftrain Taxonomy

Paul Ford describes the new Harpers Magazine site he's been working on. He's taken many of their Weekly Review and Harpers Index entries, tagged entities, and arranged them into a Taxonomy which gives you Context like This is Firearms, a means of perpetrating violence. It is part of Violence, which is part of Human Endeavor, which is part of Connections, which is part of Harpers.org. Built on 3,000 facts, 6,000 events, 12,000 links, 500 topics, and over 939 separate HTML pages. 300,000 words (but no articles!) Next: A small team of Java coders and I are planning to take the work done on Harper's, and in other places like Rhetorical Device, and create an open-sourced content management system based on RDF storage. This will allow much larger content bases (the current system will start to get gimpy at around 30 megs of XML content - fine for Harper's, but not for larger sites), and for different kinds of content to be merged. An internal Semantic Web.