Conceptual Overview

I figured it was time to provide a bit more clarity. Hopefully this achieves it:

One part of this distributed economy is distributed manufacturing, where things are made where they are needed. In addition, there is an internet side to act as an enabler. There is an emerging form of web, the semantic web (or data web), that promises to make web search much easier and organize our information. There is also visual analytics that promises to allow us to see patterns in the data.

For the semantic web, look no further than Google's Knowledge Graph for an example of a Semantic Web application, or even Facebook's Open Graph. Both of these use ontologies, which are a key component of the semantic web.

For visual analytics, Tuft's universities' Visual Understanding Environment is a good example. Ontologies and RDF export are supported (two semantic web technologies). There also are cool things it interfaces with such as zotero (a bookmarking system) and Fedora (an architecture for storing digital content) that make it a bit more powerful.

What I described in the overview post of my blog (http://adistributedeconomy.blogspot.com/2012/03/overview.html) is a big picture view of a platform and system that agglomerates all of these emerging technologies in addition to a few others. They seem to work well together.

Here are a few links:

Google's Knowledge Graph: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html

Facebook's Open graph: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

Visual Understanding Environment (VUE Project) on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/vueproject?feature=results_main

Visual Understanding Environment Home Page: http://vue.tufts.edu/

Semantic Web at the W3C: http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/

Fedora Commons Repository Software: http://fedora-commons.org/