The document discusses how wikis and controlled tagging can be used to harmonize and integrate semi-structured data on the web. It describes how controlled tagging applies consistent namespaces and tag combinations to diverse online objects. The authors used controlled tagging to gather air quality resources from the internet and combined them into a wiki with additional context. Controlled tags allowed the data to be queried and viewed in multiple ways within the wiki.

1. Harmonization and Integration of Semi-Structured Data through Wikis and Controlled Tagging. E.M. Robinson, R.B. Husar Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri Background Acknowledgements: Stefan Falke, Ed Fialkowski, Mark Kieffer, Sandor Kovacs, Earth Science Information Partners wiki community Abstract: The architectural, technological and cultural transformation of the Internet, commonly referred to as Web 2.0, is good news for the Earth Science community since it offers new possibilities for sharing and harvesting community-provided content like photos, links and blogs as well as collaboratively creating new things. One key feature of all of these new software is the end-user's ability to add tags, adding value by extending the metadata of the particular object. The semantic uniformity of the internet resources can be improved by controlled tagging which apply a consistent namespace and tag combinations to diverse objects. We have used the above tagging approach in order to gather autonomous internet resources pertaining to air quality events and data. Because of the common set of controlled tags these web objects (i.e. links and photos) were harvested in a wiki environment where additional context could be added. Used the control tag “071022SoCalSmoke” Combined RSS Feeds into an event wiki page Distributed metadata described with semantic tags Metadata queries allowed multiple wiki views DataSpaces uses semantic and controlled tags Semantic tags allows reuse