Group items tagged

Looking for tag-related resources can be tough, so we’ve dug up 30 tools and resources that every seasoned tagger should check out.

In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. 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 offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this "tidying up" approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the collaborative tagging phenomenon and explore some of the reasons for its emergence. The paper reviews the related literature and discusses some of the problems associated with, and the potential of, collaborative tagging approaches for knowledge organisation and general resource discovery.

But increasingly data is being produced without tags, and this lack of tagging makes it difficult or impossible to do intelligent aggregate and selective searches. Folksonomies and taxonomies have become powerful tools in the right hands, but too much data is created without any thoughts or any science about how that data will be maintained or re-purposed in the longer term.

I mean an open source desktop can facilitate metadata tagging from the desktop. Open source tools that interface with databases can pass metadata to and from the database. Editors (even 2d paint, 2d illustration and 3d editors) can become part of the metadata workflow.

Schemes to add functionality to the web OPAC fall into four categories: web OPAC enhancements, web OPAC wrappers, web OPAC replacements, and integrated library system replacements. I’m outlining these four techniques in a report I’m editing for an OhioLINK strategic task force and a bit of a reality check on this categorization is desired, so if I’m missing anything big (conceptually or announcements of projects/products that fall into these categories), please let me know in the comments. Generally speaking, this list is ordered by cost/complexity to implement — from lowest to highest — as well as the ability to offer the described enhanced services from least likely to most likely.

Now social bookmarking and tagging tools help librarians bridge the gap between the library's need to offer authoritative, well-organized information and their patrons' web experience.

FaceTag is a working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking information architecture resources. It aims to show how the flat keywords space of tags can be effectively mixed with a richer faceted classification scheme to improve the system information architecture.

This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks.

What is steve? Steve is a research project whose participants are building a tagging tool, collecting tags, analyzing data, and engaging in discussion. We hope to apply what we learn to improving access to works of art.

Folksonomies, or user-created taxonomies, are currently used as collaborative tools to describe images, films, hyperlinks, and other objects and documents. LibraryThing is a website that lets users catalog their own book collections through the use of Library of Congress Subject Headings and social tagging. This paper records the results of exploratory research focusing on the connection between folksonomies and controlled vocabulary and utilizing LibraryThing as a possible benchmark to measure tagging’s efficacy and accuracy as an instrument for subject analysis.

You tell us your favorite blogs. We give you a personalized feevy tag. Just place the tag in your blog template and... bang ! Your friends will appear in your blog! Feevy shows the latest posts from your favorite blogs in one column putting them in order according to the latest updates, which will appear on top.

The thread that runs through all of this discussion is the most burning question to ask before implementing any folksonomy: What are you willing to do to make it work for your user community? What kind of skills can you and your organization bring to the task? What kinds of hassles and conflicts are you willing to settle? And who in your organization is best suited to oversee such an endeavor? In each of the examples presented here there is a way to contact the ones who run the community, hear complaints, listen to suggestions or provide help to those in need. While there is necessarily a greater (Wikipedia) or lesser (ESPGame) need for supervision, there is nonetheless someone in charge. Who that is for your organization is essential to the success of the community.

catalog and community where users can upload work or select a piece of public domain writing, create reading groups and tag literature.

a web-based format where users can read and discuss the book right inside the text. The Unbound Reader uses "proximity chat," which allows users to discuss the book with other readers close to them in the text (thus focusing discussion, and, as an added benefit, keeping people from hearing about the end). It also has shared annotations, so people can leave a comment on any paragraph and other readers can respond.