Part of the allure of classifying things by assigning tags to them is that the user can give free reign to sloppiness. There is no authority —human or computational— passing judgment on the appropriateness or validity of tags, because tags have to mak
The goal of this ontology is to model the relationship between an agent, an arbitrary resource, and one or more tags. This relationship is embodied in one or more taggings, which are temporal events associating the actors.
Yesterday, I had dinner with two people from yet another startup that uses tagging and collaborative filtering in the same sentence. So are tags and collaborative filtering a marriage made in heaven? It's a promising approach, but there are challenges in
Let's explore how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular...From my first encounter with tagging (on systems such as del.icio.us & flickr), I could feel how easy it was to tag. But it took me a while to understand the cognitive processes at w
Del.icio.us tags aren’t like meta keyword tags because of the Del.icio.us Lesson. Meta keyword tags provide no personal value whatsoever. All of their value is social. They’re for aggregation engines to find and tell other people about. In other words
MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music encyclopedia. You can use Musicbrainz right now to automatically identify and label your music files — all you have to do is download and run a MusicBrainz enab
MusicBrainz is a user-maintained community music metadatabase...artist names, release titles, tracklist...Its web site is the interface which allows the creation and maintenance of the data, all user-contributed and user-maintained.
We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy... The simple idea that people’s actions model meaning better than a directory (even a flexible directory) is a critical step forward in thinking ab
Is there a true need, an actual problem to solve, that would justify creating a "tagcloud microformat?" This author believes so, and details exactly why (and how) based on a survey of tagcloud models on existing sites.
Real life data needs are never semantically pure. Users need to browse their data in different ways. Hierarchies are too hard to reorganize on a whim. Stuff I need access to DOES NOT HAPPEN TO EQUAL the stuff at the top of the tree: Hierarchies are bad a
I’m a bit of a Saussurean about this, in that I think that taxonomy (or ontology, depending upon your disciplinary point of origin) is crystallised/calcified folksonomy....Crystallised and calcified...one has connotations of order, beauty, and value; th
You can tag arbitrary content on the web, you can do it in a low-tech way to make it easy for everyone to do...But...How do you find instances that people haven't tagged? Or deal with overlapping meme labels?
A memespace has a unique alphanumeric identifier to disambiguate it from other memespaces. The present design for meme IDs is: MEMESPACE-TAXOSPACE-ID. Essentially, it's another controlled vocabulary...
Memography is our name for a simple syntax for tagging that affords high precision and recall when searching & retrieving the web pages you've tagged (mimetic search)...
extisp.icio.us images displays a random Yahoo images search result for each of a user's tag words (excluding those which they've only ever used once). extisp.icio.us text gives you a random textual scattering of a user's tags, sized according to the numbe
Folksonomic Flaws?...In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work...We begin by looking at the issue of "sloppy tags", a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offse