www.tomspetition.org

When an email concerning www.tomspetition.org fell into my inbox I initially thought it was a piece of sick spam. Not so. It is in fact a petition to renew the Assault Weapons ban, set up by Tom Mauser, whose 15-year old son was killed in the Columbine High School massacre. To support the cause, the site includes a cool graphical map of the US, illustrating the location and degrees of separation between signatories. When you sign the petition, you can see your position in the email trail from origin. This is an unlikely illustration of the power of metadata. From basic RDF graphs to GIS to Musicompass, structured metadata can make a lot more sense when it's represented graphically, particularly if orchestration between vocabularies is taking place. I'd like to see more more topographies and ontologies represented graphically; doing it really well so that the outputs are comprehensible will be the challenge I guess.

Posted by monoman at 01:05 PM on July 13, 2004