Microformats for Innovative Lexicons

A microformat is a set of design principles for including semantic information within standard X/HTML markup. Individual microformat entities are distributed yet share a common semantics. Each microformat is a granule of structured information containing a set of attributes. These information granules can be produced, distributed, aggregated, and consumed without reliance on centralized services. We describe the impact on the gathering, distribution, and analysis of concepts within our visual communication research. In this paper we present solutions for managing lexical consistency when microformat-structured information granules are distributed and maintained independently and asynchronously. Lexical groups and hierarchies leverage the resulting inconsistencies, utilizing term aggregation across visual and linguistic features to dynamically compose lexicons and to perform lexical analysis. We think of this as creating semantic and orthographic ´projections´ of the lexicon into different feature spaces. We show how to use this approach to construct situated lexicons which derive from shared context and social communities.