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.

 

ABSTRACT

Abstract
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%.

There are numerous difficulties with collaborative tagging systems (e.g. low precision, lack of collocation, etc.) that originate from the absence of properties that characterise controlled vocabularies. However, such systems can not be dismissed. Librarians and information professionals have lessons to learn from the interactive and social aspects exemplified by collaborative tagging systems, as well as their success in engaging users with information management. The future co-existence of controlled vocabularies and collaborative tagging is predicted, with each appropriate for use within distinct information contexts: formal and informal.
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.

ABSTRACT

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.

Dan Bricklin describes an image capture for a social bookmarking system for shopping.  The image capture makes a thumbnail of the image and uses it as a tag.  Neat idea...maybe applicable.

NINES is a federation of peer-reviewed resources and innovative research tools, made freely available to students and scholars of 19th-century culture.

Times magazine article on scanning the library and how this is tranformative.  Adam gave me this heads-up as a "good introduction to tagging and scanning for the layman".

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? 

Not only do people make lists, they like to share lists...

Interesting discussion about making OPML dynamic like the RSS feeds that an OPML file aggregates.  This would allow the distribution model of OPML to be changed to a subscription model.  In TagIt, we've sort of got this without having to change the way feed readers work.  Since a bibliography is capable of creating an RSS feed, they already can be read by the feed readers dynamically -- that is, the readers can get new content as the bibliography is updated.  And since the bibliography topics themselves are simply posts, they can be consumed via RSS.  The only things I'd need to do in the code is

• update the timestamp on the bibliography topic whenever a component is added or edited
• give access to an rss feed of just the bibliography topics (by user or by TagIt instance) 

Helpful for suggesting 5 measures that can be used to weight the impact of a post:

• recursive - citerank
• use counts
• rating scores
• co-citation & hub-authority scores
• author self citations

While clearly aimed at journal article citation impact rankings, some of this could be useful to determine an impact factor for the tagging system.

In PennTags, I'd like to rate posts on their impact, and extend ratings to authors too. This could build into a matrix that supports 'tribal elders' in a community of learners. I would expect that faculty would be rated high in impact, since many students would copy or follow their posts. As their postings became more impactful, the faculty authors themselves would become more impactful too. But it is a democracy of postings, and students or staff could rise. Some, some kind of hubbing would need to be developed too.

Wow, all I can say is this is very complicated...

An H2O playlist is a shared list of readings and other content about a topic of intellectual interest.  it is a simple yet powerful way to group and exchange useful links to information -- online and offline.

I saw a presentation at Educause about this and talked to these guys.  It is an open source project in java/tomcat.  Really very similar to TagIt, but it is presented in the context playlists.  Also, cool idea of 'influence' rather than subjective ratings like in TagIt...

You can look at what various people and groups of people are reading on the web here. You can get an account and add your own links, and create and join groups here too. If you get an account, or create a group, either one can be made private, so nobody but you (if a private account) or your fellow group members (if a private group) can see your links.