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"The October/November 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology includes a special section on Folksonomies.
* Introduction: Folksonomies and Image Tagging: Seeing the Future? by Diane Neal, Guest Editor
* Why Are They Tagging, and Why Do We Want Them To? by P. Jason Morrison
* Trouble in Paradise: Conflict Management and Resolution in Social Classification Environments by Chris Landbeck
* Image Indexing: How Can I Find a Nice Pair of Italian Shoes? by Elaine Ménard
* Flickr Image Tagging: Patterns Made Visible by Joan Beaudoin"
Libraries using del.icio.us
From the website:
Abstract:
This presentation by Dr. Ana Alice Baptista, head of Odisseia, will describe several projects including:
- CRiB (Conversion and Recommendation of Digital Object Formats), a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) designed to assist cultural heritage institutions in the implementation of migration-based preservation interventions. The CRiB system works by assessing the quality of distinct conversion applications or services to produce recommendations of optimal migration strategies. The recommendations produced by the system take into account the specific preservation requirements of each client institution.
- Add-ons to DSpace
- Commenting Add-On: a set of classes, servlets and custom tags that bring informal communication capabilities to the DSpace environment. The informal communication is assured by a threaded forum that can be attached to any DSpace resource: web-page, community, collection, submitted item or e-person.
- Ontology Add-On: a feature that allows administrators to control the set of keywords used to describe submitted items. U Minho has ported to its system the publicly-available Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computing Classification System (CCS).
- Recommendation Add-On: a set of custom tags that provide suggestions of resources (items, e-persons and comments) related to a given selected resource.
- Web of Communication Add-On: the 3D Web of Communication allows the user to discover hidden relationships between items, comments and people. It works by displaying a VRML 3D web of resources involved in a communication process. The user is also able to jump to specific items on the environment thus providing a 3D navigational system over DSpace.
- Social tagging: Odisseia is involved in two social tagging-related projects: 1. to find out how information retrieval is affected by the use of social tags, 2. an international collaborative effort investigate which kinds of tags are being commonly used.
The panel will explore the relevance of the emerging tagging systems (Flickr, Del.icio.us, RawSugar and more). Why do they seem to work? What kinds of incentives are required for users to participate? Will tagging survive and scale to mass adoption? What are the behavioral, economic, and social models that underlie each tagging system? What are the dynamics of those systems, and how are they derived from the specific application's design and affordances?.We will demand answers to these questions and others from some of the pioneering practitioners and academics in the field. Bring your wireless laptop to participate in a live tagging experiment! The experiment results will be shown and discussed at the end of the panel. To add to the fun, parts of the discussion will be motivated by short video segments.
In this paper we explore a method of decomposition of compound tags found in social tagging systems
and outline several results, including improvement of search indexes, extraction of semantic information,
and benefits to usability. Analysis of tagging habits demonstrates that social tagging systems such as
del.icio.us and flickr include both formal metadata, such as geotags, and informally created metadata,
such as annotations and descriptions. The majority of tags represent informal metadata; that is, they are
not structured according to a formal model, nor do they correspond to a formal ontology.
Statistical exploration of the main tag corpus demonstrates that such searches use only a subset of the
available tags; for example, many tags are composed as ad hoc compounds of terms. In order to improve
accuracy of searching across the data contained within these tags, a method must be employed to
decompose compounds in such a way that there is a high degree of confidence in the result. An approach
to decomposition of English-language compounds, designed for use within a small initial sample tagset, is
described. Possible decompositions are identified from a generous wordlist, subject to selective lexicon
snipping. In order to identify the most likely, a Bayesian classifier is used across term elements. To
compensate for the limited sample set, a word classifier is employed and the results classified using a
similar method, resulting in a successful classification rate of 88%, and a false negative rate of only 1%.
Research limitations/implications – Librarians and information professional researchers should be playing a leading role in research aimed at assessing the efficacy of collaborative tagging in relation to information storage, organisation, and retrieval, and to influence the future development of collaborative tagging systems.
Practical implications – The paper indicates clear areas where digital libraries and repositories could innovate in order to better engage users with information.
Collaborative tagging systems, or folksonomies, have the potential of becoming technological infrastructure to support knowledge management activities in an organization or a society. There are many challenges, however. This paper presents designs that enhance collaborative tagging systems to meet some key challenges: community identification, ontology generation, user and document recommendation. Design prototypes, evaluation methodology and selected preliminary results are presented.
GeoRSS
This site describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.
To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.
Brief blog entry comparing tagging and controlled vocab.
"tagging has brought metadata to the masses"
FEATURES
For that reason, the site features a blog, a wiki, RSS feeds and email alerts -- the last two being configurable down to individual tags. Users can rate sites and add them to a "favorites" page.
A much better than average report on the relationships between librarianship and the values of libraries and the values held by the media savvy, technology-centered students of today. Describes the two sets of values, and describes how libraries can adabt to the new expectation in meaningful ways.
pg 99 "It is clear that Millennials and others comfortable with a wide range of media and technologies will redefine the traditional manifestations of research and creative activity with these new mashed, cut and pasted creations. For them, the line between consumer and creator is blurred in a way that previously was not possible."
pg 100 "Clear rifts have emerged in the virtual terrain that is occupied by library policies, services and collections and is explored by online users. These rifts or disconnects can be grouped into three classifications for redress. These include technology (infrastructure and integration), policy (copyright, IT policy, liability), and unexploited opportunities."
Argues for the usefulness of collaborative tagging, and highlights the known problems with free tagging. Points to some obvious, and some more controversial ways of limiting problems of inter-tagger inconsistency and meaningless distinctions.
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.
Shows the practices of taggers and tags.
Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.
Looks at the development of various classification systems leading up to tagging, or user created metadata. Argues that tagging more closely mirrors the nature of web information.
Argues that ontologies are a bad ideal for organizing the world online. Points out that library classification systems are designed to optimize space on the shelves, not to describe the essences of identities. Also, that library classification systems are fundamentally about organizing books, not about organizing the enormity of human knowledge. The same flaws exists in a hierarchical file system. That it is designed with the assumption that a thing can only be in one place at one time -- it makes some attempt to have the organizional structure of ideas match the physical world, where in fact a pointer, or an idea, or a metaphorical path can be in countless places at the same time, and can have many equally important and useful relationships which describe it.
That ontologies are useful where there are expert users, clear categories and a limited domain. But, much less useful for non-expert users or large domains, and fuzzy categories. Links are the universal pointers on the web, and the addition of tags is simple, and provides a much more useful finding system than an ontology. With a system like delicious, you get to know who's doing the tagging, not just what the tags are, so you get to limit searches by people and time, limiting the size of your group [penntags tie-in].
from the infosthetics blog - "semantically ordered tag clouds that resemble self-organizing maps. the size of the text & the color brightness of the background represent the frequency of the different terms. this technique has been applied to visualize the keywords present in website favorites, or the tags used by different del.ico.us users for the same web pages."
tags clouds developed by Moritz Stefaner
Really well, reviewed in TechCrunch, this is a new, open source social bookmarking tool. Apparently, it allows you to upload and bookmark all kinds of files.
And since Google Notebook lives in your browser, you won't be left with a scattered collection of notes, Word docs, and browser bookmarks to sort through; all your web findings will be gathering into one organized, easy accessible location that you can access from any computer.
Plum is similar to Kaboodle and Stylehive in that it is a social bookmarking site that allows users to add a lot of metadata about bookmarks (including images). Bookmarked items can tagged and be added to a public, private or shared “collection” (there are a number of defaul collections and more can be added).
One key way that Plum is different than other bookmarking site is that it allows users to bookmark items on their computer, not just on the web. A file that is open in certain desktop applications (things like photos, power point presentations, iTunes playlists, address book entries, email, etc) can be added to Plum by clicking a button on the Plummer, a small downloadable application for Windows or Mac. See the last screen shot below for a look at the Plummer.
Gee...projects and local resource tagging! How are we to ever keep up?
My favorite article. I wish I could force you to read this article. please...
"And you would never ever get this organization of knowledge right. Its not a solvable problem. It cant be done. Theres not a right way of doing it because there’s no single way of organizing this stuff. Taxonomies are not reflections of nature, they’re tools. And tools depend on what you want to do. It depends on your context. So along comes tagging."