Group items tagged

Methods for improving tags

To succeed, attempting to improve tag literacy (or tag etiquette) in the folksonomy world involves two processes. Firstly, the community needs to be ready to set rules and agree upon a set of standards for tags. Secondly, users need to be made aware of and agree to follow these rules. At the moment, although there are no standard guidelines on good tag selection practices, those in the folksonomy community have offered many ideas. Ways in which tags may be improved are presented frequently on blogs and folksonomy discussion sites. In his article on tag literacy, Ulises Ali Mejias suggests a number of tag selection "best practices" [14]. These include: using plurals rather than singulars using lower case, grouping words using an underscore, following tag conventions started by others and adding synonyms.

A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy. Tagging was popularized by websites associated with Web 2.0 and is an important feature of many Web 2.0 services. It is now also part of some desktop software.