"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.
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
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
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...