There’s a new information gathering resource called Twine that makes use of something called the semantic web. The semantic web is “about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources” and “language for recording how the data relates to real world objects.” In other words, as far as I understand it which is very little right now, the semantic web seems to be a way of threading together information, places, objects and people via the ideas (not just the data) they share in common. If that sounds nebulous to you it’s probably because it’s nebulous to me.

Twine is part database, part bookmark and link aggregator, part social network, part news discovery, and part forum… and probably a few other things as well.

A while back, TechCrunch wrote about it. They said that once you give Twine whatever information you want, it then

applies a semantic analysis to it that creates tags for each document or video or photo. The tags match up to concepts that Twine’s algorithms associate with each piece of content, regardless of whether that concept is specifically mentioned in the Web page or other content being tagged. For example, you might bookmark this post and Twine would create tags for all the people mentioned in it (Nova Spivack, Paul Allen, Peter Rip, and Ron Conway). It would also create tags for the organizations related to the post, such as Radar Networks and DARPA, but also Paul Allen’s venture firm Vulcan Capital—even if Vulcan was never mentioned in the post.

Or, in other words,

Twine is putting structure onto all of this unstructured data that is out there by analyzing it and adding tags to it that are connected together.

Well, that sounded neat to me so I immediately sent an email to Twine asking to be invited to the beta group. I waited, and waited, and then…

 

I waited some more.

Finally, yesterday, I gave up, unpinned the TechCrunch article from my bloglines viewer and sighed. An hour or so later the beta invite arrived. So now I’ve been playing with this thing and it’s cool. It’s also very unfinished. Probably the most popular thread, or twine as they’re called, is the titled Feedback, Suggestions, Questions, Comments. What’s nifty about this is that the users seem genuinely interested in making twine a completely rock your world kind of place.

I was not surprised at all to find that Clive Thompson is a twiner, and I see that he’s preparing an article on the service which I’ll be very interested to read.

I haven’t linked to Twine.com directly because you wouldn’t see anything but a page that tells you it’s in private beta. But I will give a link to the about page from which you can ask for an invite if you’re so inclined.