Quantt: a hashtag syntax for describing quantities in socialnetworking status messages

Francis Dierick Quantter, Konstanz, Germany

{francis.dierick@gmail.com

Abstract:

Hashtags* were introduced in 2007 by Nate Ritter as an informal conven-tion for tagging content in twitter messages. Several other syntax conventions such asNanoformats* and TripleTags* have been suggested since but the simple Hashtag hasseen the most widespread adoption. In this specification we propose a simple hashtagsyntax extension to deal with quantities. We further argue that numbers are an essen-tial part of human expression and often deserve to be part of the status message bodyas opposed to staying hidden in the message’s metadata.

1 The Common Quantt

In its simplest form a Quantt

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is a hashtag-based syntax for describing QUANTiTieson twitter. A Quantt consists of a key:value pair separated by a semicolon and prefixedwith a ’#’ sign as is usual for hashtags. Besides being a twitter convention, the ’#’ sign isalready commonly used in Western culture to denote quantities. The colon was chosen as aseparator because of its meaning in natural language grammar and because it is frequentlyused in dealing with quantities*.People talk about quantities all the time in social networks: how many kms they ran, howmany hours they worked, how much weight they lost. Below are some common examplesof quantities described in quantt format:

Twitter: "I ran 5km today #run:5km"Twitter: "Went shopping today, bought 5 pairs of shoes #shoppingguilt:3/4"

The Quantt format can be expressed in Extended Backus-Naur Form as following*:

quantt = [ "#" ] key value [ unit ].key = alpha { alphanum } ( ":" ).value = integer | float | fraction .integer = digit { digit }.float = integer "." integer.fraction = integer "/" integer.unit = alpha { alpha }.

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Visually it can be expressed like this:Both "," and "." can be used for the decimal point separator in floating point numbers &the "/" character is allowed as a convenient way to describe fractions. The key should beXml and Url encoding compatible in order to facilitate serialization in XML/JSON.Initially we planned to use only SI units and their derivatives, but we quickly found outthat a more open-ended approach to units is needed. E.g. how would you describe the

 

concept of ’pages’ in SI units as expressed in the following message?

Twitter: "I made great progress in studying for my exams today #pages:33"

The quantt syntax is compatible with most major social media platforms, easy for humansto understand and straightforward for machines to parse. This simple Quantt syntax is alsoprobably the first syntax introduced to the general public with a cartoon.*

2 Semantic Quantts

While triple tags or machine tags have seen some adoption on social networking sites,the full semantic power of these triple constructs has not been unleashed. Twitter hopesto change this with the addition of annotations to messages. A Twitter annotation can beexpressed as a triple consisting of a type, a key and a value. This can be written in JSONlike this:

"annotations":[{"type":{"attribute":"value"}}]

Or simplified like this:

"type:attribute=value"

While Semantic Quantts could be expressed as triples inside the message body with asyntax similar to the one described above*, we assume that most will be hidden from theuser as metadata. Therefore we propose that the generic "quantity" namespace (possibleabbreviations: "qnt", "qty") be reserved for describing numbers. One potential schema isthe one described below, but we leave it up to the community to set up conventions:

"quantity":[{"swim":{"value":"number"}, {"unit" : "unit"}}]

3 The signalling function of numbers

A significant % of messages on twitter contain numbers of some kind. With automatedtools like Nike+ getting more widespread use we expect the amount of tweets containingnumbers to rise. For machine-generated tweets it often makes sense to hide the numbersin metadata. But in many cases the number is at the core of the message, especially if people are talking about some kind of effort / achievement. When I regularly tweet abouta topic it can be arguably said that "the number is the message", e.g. in the context of myswimming training:Twitter: "Started swimming in open water again. It was freezing cold, but I did a greatdistance. #swim:3km"By simply quantifying my effort I signal that 1) this particular effort is important to me 2)I expect to progress over time 3) I hope my friends keep track on my progress.