winnowTag is a web-based

recommender system A recommender system (RecSys), or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing ''system'' with terms such as ''platform'', ''engine'', or ''algorithm'') and sometimes only called "the algorithm" or "algorithm", is a subclass of information fi ...

and

news aggregator In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital Content (media), content such as online newsp ...

in which a person tags example items as belonging to a topic, thus training statistical text classification software to find more items on that same topic. Released as a publicly available

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

in September 2010 by Mindloom, winnowTag uses Winnow content recommendation, a

Naive Bayes In statistics, naive (sometimes simple or idiot's) Bayes classifiers are a family of " probabilistic classifiers" which assumes that the features are conditionally independent, given the target class. In other words, a naive Bayes model assumes th ...

text classifier evolved from SpamBayes. Users of winnowTag create and share tags, and use the shared tags of others to find on-topic content in real time. Users can add feeds, import OPML feed lists, and publish feeds of items found by tags. winnowTag collects and retains items from the last three months of thousands of blog, news, and website

Atom Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...

and

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

feeds.

Comparison

With many news aggregators users find and add each feed they wish to read, and scan the titles of all items published in those feeds to find content they want. Thus it is possible to consider every item published in a set of feeds, but the volume of items to view grows as the set of feeds grows. In winnowTag, each tag filters all items in all feeds added by all users to automatically find information on its topic. Thus it is possible to discover on-topic items from a larger set of feeds than could be manually reviewed, but not all the on-topic items are found, and there is no facility for seeing every item published in a set of feeds.

Background

The winnowTag project, funded by The Kaphan Foundation, develops computer technology to help

online communities An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members engage in computer-mediated communication primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, on ...

self-organize and cope with large volumes of unstructured information. A principal idea is that users need individually tailored views (tags) reflecting their own specific interests. The tags in turn represent common interests that can be shared between users. An early premise was derived from ecology. Instead of static, unchanging software, users get fragments of software that can be copied and aligned into different forms, and from these pieces they construct their own unique software that does what they want. Then they pass pieces of software around, and over time this population of fragments of software acts like an evolving ecology and adapts to demands of users.Beyond Formalisms: The Art and Science of Designing Pliant Systems
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References

External links

* {{Aggregators Recommender systems News aggregators