Open Identification and Linking of the Four Ws

Platforms for social computing connect users via shared references to people with whom they have relationships, events attended, places lived in or traveled to, and topics such as favorite books or movies. Since free text is insufficient for expressing such references precisely and unambiguously, many social computing platforms coin identifiers for topics, places, events, and people and provide interfaces for finding and selecting these identifiers from controlled lists. Using these interfaces, users collaboratively construct a web of links among entities.