thanks a lot for your comment. You are absolutely right, human recommendations are still by far more qualitative than the majority of algorithm based ones (see also ex.fm or thisismyjam.com). However, companies such as echonest are trying their best to compete with human recommendations.

Cheers

PS: re. the latex to html converting – I tried it several times with various tools in this area – without any success so far. building a html page manually would be very time intensive (especially, when trying to keep all the interlinking … )

But my most recent conclusions were that the best recommendation system in Music is human aggregation (like Musicplayr.com). Because Music is so personal, no algorithm can predict what one will enjoy or not. First because an algorithm can’t tell whether it is good quality music or pure commercial crap.

But I haven’t read your thesis yet.

And concerning the htmling of you thesis, I don’t think you should use automatic latex converter, but make it plain html as a whole.

Best

1. Use a name reference mechanism
2. Use an information resource delivering mechanism
3. Use a resource description mechanism
4. Provide a resource connection mechanism
5. Provide an information resource modification mechanism

Anyway, endusers are not really interested in the applied technology and mechanism behind at all. They like have a machine (helper) that assist them by executing certain tasks. Thereby, the message (as you also said) is the same as always, which exists right from the beginning of the WWW project – “Let’s Share What We Know”.
Overall, it might be the best to hide URIs as much as possible (cf. my thoughts here) e.g., I can easily create a reference in a Facebook message by typing an ‘@’ and by entering further letters a filter is applied that reduces the information space for reference selection; thereby, I don’t see any URI at all (all the time nice human readable labels). That’s usability! URIs in general don’t deliver a quite good user experience if they are visible. However, the name reference mechanism behind delivers a cool user experience.

PS: I think that ‘referent’ and ‘resource’ (or synomyms of it) are not bad words for an everyday audience. I rather believe that they are quite natural.

The message as I understand it, is that data can be shared in the Web using the same techniques as other information, like the millions of Web pages we’re already used to seeing. And then when your Web data mentions other things that can be described in the Web, it’s good to use normal Web URIs (URLs to everyone else) as identifiers, so the information can be found and merged, and so that these little pieces of data can be linked together.

That’s still too nerdy for 99.525% of humanity, but if we can avoid talking about referents and resources and http headers, I’d guess we’ll be heading in a more universally understandable direction.

PS: You can believe me, I checked very much the relevant specs during the last time. I’m now quite happy with my point of view that makes sense on that issues (at least for me ).

I too always /assumed/ “links” were from resource to resource, until I read the specs, and found precisely nothing to back-up my assumptions, in fact it was quite the opposite. Just check the specs, you’ll see.