Beyond Bookmarking

Situation Analysis

You stumble across an important document on the Web (or your private HTTP based Intranet). Naturally, you would like to store a reference to the aforementioned document via the act commonly known as "bookmarking" .

Bookmarking Problem

When you store a bookmark at best you have a URL (hyperlink) and a piece of text commonly referred to as a Tag. That's it. As should be pretty obvious, you need a little more than that for future recall and/or construction of a useful knowledgebase.

Problem Solution

Simply use the power of hyperlinks to construct meaningful statements about the document identified by the URL which solves the basic bookmarking problem while opening up a whole new level of productivity and sophistication.

Example

I stumbled across an article [1] that describes projected growth for the IoT market segment. Naturally, I would like to capture pertinent information form the aforementioned article for future reference and knowledgebase enhancement. Thus, I simply take my notes as follows, using nanotation [2], which turns this post into a structured data source, of the NoSQL variety:

{

## What follows are RDF Language sentences where the subject, predicate, and objects of the sentences are identified unambiguously using HTTP URI (hyperlinks).

## Using RDF Language sentences to describing an article, using terms from schema.org, vcard, rdfs, and foaf vocabularies.

<http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/the_internet_of_things_the_value_of_digitizing_the_physical_world>

a schema:BlogPosting, schema:WebPage ;

rdfs:label "Unlocking the Potential of the Internet of Things" ;

schema:about <https://twitter.com/hashtag/IoT#this> ;

schema:author <https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuimichael#this> ;

wdrs:describedby <> .

## Sentences Describing Post Author

<https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuimichael#this>

a foaf:Person ;

foaf:name "Michael Chui" ;

vcard:org <https://www.linkedin.com/company/1371#this> ;

wdrs:describedby <> .

}

Here's a visualization of the statements above, courtesy of our Structured Data Sniffer Browser Extension.

Conclusion

Depending on bookmarking and meaningless tags SHOULD be a thing of the past. The same hyperlinks that gave us the Web of Linked Documents also enables the construction of a Web of Linked Data -- via RDF Language sentences.

Caution: Forget everything you've ever heard about RDF being a format. That's the product of poor messaging. RDF is an abstract Language expressible using a variety of notations (one example used in this post) and serializable using a variety of document content formats.

I'll add links to the comments section of this post demonstrating the effect of the RDF Language based structured data island embedded in this post, using nanotation.