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
... 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...
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
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...
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.
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
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
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
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