Newstagging 2.0

Adrian Holovaty points to how tagging news stories on the web can lead us closer to the Semantic Web.

"...one thing that's always bothered me is that the bread-and-butter of my chosen field, journalism, is relentlessly unstructured. The primary product of journalists -- the news story -- is just a giant blob of text.

"A news story cannot be broken down into easily defined, consistent pieces. It doesn't have facts in predictable places."

He suggests several tags:
1.: for different levels of profanity for different websites or let the user decide his/her level of tolerance.
2. : Saying something happened Tuesday or today doesn't make sense on the web unless you put a date to it.
3. : for standard GMT times
4. : to set an expiry on stories.
5. : to make currency relevant on date of story.
6.: for geographically accurate tagging.
7. Automatic conversion
8. Isolating people and quotes: for marking up each quote, and associating it with the person who said it, so it would be possible to automatically retrieve all quotes by a given person.
9. Isolating individual facts: giving unique IDs for each and every fact. This would let journalists and readers create elaborate "fact trees," which could display the relationship between information. Ref: Microformats.

MORE.