The problems with tags depend on two factors: the authors and the tag's used word
See tags as resources with a semantic meaning
Tagging is the action of annotate words to a resource (a document, an image, etc). It's a way to categories and organizes these resources.
You can perform this tagging action for your own, while using Gmail by attaching tags to your incoming message, or use it in a social network by tagging bookmark entries in Del.icio.us for example.
Basically tags are only separate words linked to a resource. The author can put words with or without a semantic meaning one between another. He can put words in semantic relation with or without the tagged resource. The entire tagging job is done at the discretion of the author.
The action of tagging will be an operand of the whole formula that describe the success or the failure of a system using these tags.
The second factor will be how a system will use these tags. A basic system will bind and show all resources with the same tag, wrote with the same letters. Then, "blog" and "blogs" are not the same tags. Resources with "blog" as a tag will not be bound and shown with resources tagged with the word "blogs".
Given this problem, some systems using tags will suggest a list of related tags. Some systems perform well at this task, like Technorati who seem to suggest tags with related semantic.
Others perform poorly because they only suggest tags that contain the tag’s word. By example, if I search for the "blog" tag, such a system will suggest me categories like "blogs", "anablog", "tierryisblog", etc. This method is clearly ineffective and probably useless.
I think that this feature proposed by systems using tags is just a plug-in implemented to try to cope with this problem.
How could we upgrade the tagging idea to get rid of such feature and remove a part of the responsibility of the tagging authors in the whole process? I think that the principles of the semantic web would help us to upgrade the tagging idea.
How would this work? Intuitively it would work like this:
1. Consider the group of tags that describe a resource as a resource in itself.
2. Systems like Technorati would scan posts to extract these "tag resource".
3. After the system would semantically link all these "tag resource" according to an ontology to relate, semantically, each "tag resources".
4. Finally when a user would make a tag search query, results would not only be the resources with the specific tag but also all the other resources according to the semantic of the tag(s) searched.
In this post I'm talking of a new way to see tags; tags as resources with a semantic meaning; not about words that, theoretically, describe a resource.
Technorati Tags: [tag] [folksonomy] [web] [semantic]
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