About

Fuzzzy you say?

Fuzzzy is a revolutionary social bookmarking system. The system is developed as a Web 2.0 organic ontology collaborative socio-semantic polyscopic web research project at the University of Oslo. :) Still fuzzy? Ok, it's a place for you to store links to your favorite websites!

What is all the fuzzz about

Why is it different from del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites? Fuzzzy is not only social but also semantic because Tags have more meaning. When tags are assigned a meaning using a standard like the ISO 13250 Topic Map then people as well as other computer systems can make use of the embedded knowledge in a more meaningful way. More on Topic Maps at Wikipedia. This way of categorising content is a middle way between the top-down monolithic taxonomy approach like the Yahoo directory and the more recent social tagging (folksonomy) approaches. It is also more collaborative and will help to build a consensus language that can improve communication. The semantics presented especially on tag pages will also support users in learning.

Messy or just Fuzzzy?

We call the mesh of tags a simple fuzzy common ontology (folktology) or a semantic tag cloud. Our folktology has a set of interelated tags where each tag has a list of synonyms or aliases, a short descriptions and a list of associations to other tags. This makes the semantic tags suitable for categorization and can be used by various applications. The Fuzzzy system also acts as a tag-server.

How is it diffrent from Wikipedia?

Some people notice a similarity between Fuzzzy and wikipedia. Both have user generated content which is available by subject. While Wikipedia goes in depth to map all knowlege, Fuzzzy instead is an extremly condensed version. To use some metaphors. Wikipedia can be seen as a gigantic book (encyclopedia) and Fuzzzy can be seen as a cabinet filled with the yellow card tags that was used in pre-computerized libraries. Fuzzzy is also an archive of bookmarks. Bookmarks can be viewed as the strips that people put inside their books to help them look up and continue reading from where they were last time. The only difference is that the bookmark is used to put inside the web if you think of the web as a very big book.

The purpose of Wikipedia is to create a free encyclopedia. The purpose of Fuzzzy is to create an open and free distributed global tagging infrastructure.

How is it diffrent from other social bookmarking services?

Fuzzzy is semantic, collaborative and partly democratic. Users collaborate on creating tags, bookmarks and the semantics for gluing the tags and bookmarks/books together. The underlying semantic Topic Maps system enable global tagging and interchange. This makes Fuzzzy unique.

Who's Fuzzzy?

The system is developed by Roy Lachica The aim of this project is to investigate human computer interaction issues related to the use of collaborative socio-semantic solutions as well as to build new knoweldge in the field of socio-semantic collaborative knowledge federation and interchange systems and develoment. Got it?

Fuzzzy future

The system is a research project and some parts of the system may be very experimental. We are continously developing the system and we plan to do so the years to come. Most of the system platform and knowledge gained trhough this project will be reused on the upcomming Omniscious project. The aim of the Omniscious project is to provide an information infrastructure for collaborative solving of global knowledge issues and enable creation and sharing of holistic knowledge.

If for some reason Fuzzzy is to be terminated (not very likly for many years), we will inform you some time before the service is shut down. In that case, export mechanisms will let you move your data somewhere else.

Credits

Thanks to Networked Planet for sponsoring the project with their TMCore Topic Map engine. Thanks to Jack Park and Dr. Steven R. Newcomb for their theoretical contributions. I would also like to thank Lars Marius Garshol for valuable comments along the way.