It is no surprise that Semantic Web researchers and enthusiasts are excited to publish and accumulate semi-structured data on the Web. But looking beyond our community, we recognize that many, many other people also have structured data and want to publish it in rich browsing interfaces. These small-time authors fall into the same category as those early enthusiasts of the Web who were simply excited by the opportunity of using the new medium to share information that they cared about. With this insight, we create a lightweight structured data publishing framework called Exhibit that duplicates many factors we believe have contributed to the original growth of the Web. We argue that appealing to this segment of the Web population--addressing their publishing needs and desires at very low cost in many aspects--lets us leverage their labor to structure-ize existing content on the Web that has previously been authored in HTML by hand and is remaining hard to harvest automatically.
Slot:
New Brunswick, Friday, May 11, 2007, 10:30am to 12 noon.