"URIs, a universal identification scheme, are different from human names insofar as they can provide the ability to reliably access the thing identified. URIs also can function to reference a non-accessible thing in a similar manner to how names function in natural language. There are two distinctly different relationships between names and things: access and reference. To confuse the two relations leads to underlying problems with Web architecture. Reference is by nature ambiguous in any language. So any attempts by Web architecture to make reference completely unambiguous will fail on the Web. Despite popular belief otherwise, making further ontological distinctions often leads to more ambiguity, not less. Contrary to appeals to Kripke for some sort of eternal and unique identification, reference on the Web uses descriptions and therefore there is no unambiguous resolution of reference. On the Web, what is needed is not just a simple redirection, but a uniform and logically consistent manner of associating descriptions with URIs that can be done in a number of practical ways that should be made consistent. "
"The debate within the Web community over the optimal means
by which to organize information often pits formalized classications
against distributed collaborative tagging systems. A number
of questions remain unanswered, however, regarding the nature of
collaborative tagging systems including whether coherent categorization
schemes can emerge from unsupervised tagging by users.
This paper uses data from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to
examine the dynamics of collaborative tagging systems. In particular,
we examine whether the distribution of the frequency of use
of tags for popular sites with a long history (many tags and many
users) can be described by a power law distribution, often characteristic
of what are considered complex systems. We produce a
generative model of collaborative tagging in order to understand
the basic dynamics behind tagging, including how a power law distribution
of tags could arise. We empirically examine the tagging
history of sites in order to determine how this distribution arises
over time and to determine the patterns prior to a stable distribution.
Lastly, by focusing on the high-frequency tags of a site where
the distribution of tags is a stabilized power law, we show how tag
co-occurrence networks for a sample domain of tags can be used
to analyze the meaning of particular tags given their relationship to
other tags."
The paper shows that the tags users choose are not chaotic, but rather quickly converge to a common descriptive set of tags that is almost unchanging over time. Perhaps once the tags have stabilized, coherent URI-based identification schemes could emerge?
Nice paper, thanks. Categories / tags / subjects / topics / issues ... that's what I'm working with right now. p.s. sure would be nice if the email notification included the source URL. I'm far more likely to download the PDF when I see something like www2007.org/paper635.pdf