"Whether you realize it or not, you're already familiar with controlled vocabularies. The Library of Congress subject headings and Yahoo's search criteria are a couple of examples. So, as you've probably guessed by now, controlled vocabularies are predete
Online reference managers are extraordinary productivity tools, but it would be a mistake to take this as their primary interest for the academic community. As it is often the case for social software services, online reference managers are becoming power
While professionally created metadata are often considered of high quality, it is costly in terms of time and effort to produce. User created metadata is a third approach, and this paper focuses on grassroots community classification of digital assets.
Tag Descriptions allow you to describe your tags for yourself and others visiting your bookmarks...simply go to your tag page. From this page you should see a link called "create tag description". Clicking this link pops up the interface for creating a Ta
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
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
Social bookmark tools are rapidly emerging on the Web. In such systems users are setting up lightweight conceptual structures called folksonomies. The reason for their immediate success is the fact that no specific skills are needed for participating. At
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
Though I am excited by organic, individual tagging tools there are situations where introducing this can be problematic. Health information content, in particular, seems to be a strong candidate for more centralized, regulated classification and tagging..
The "expert" arrogance that occasionally accompanies taxonomies...which are essential...information management tools...[does not acknowledge that] taxonomies are never done, they are not easily emergent, they are incredibly resource-intensive, and they do
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
3pointD.com reports on emerging 3D connectivity, the metaverse, virtual worlds like Second Life, Google Earth, concepts like folksonomy, and the culture of online worlds.
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?
... to aggregate blog posts from different blogs about a conference...the trick was that all the posts would use a particular text string or “shibboleth” phrase to identify them as being about the same topic...
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...
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
Because tags are relativized, personal, idiosyncratic views can coexist and thrive in the form of tags, in spite of their inconsistencies. Readers of texts on the Internet become individual interpreters, despite the document author's intent...Yet, a state