Slashdot Mirror
The Need For A Tagging Standard
John Carmichael writes "Tags are everywhere now. Not just blogs, but famous news sites, corporate press bulletins, forums, and even Slashdot. That's why it's such a shame that they're rendered almost entirely useless by the lack of a tagging standard with which tags from various sites and tag aggregators like Technorati and Del.icio.us can compare and relate tags to one another.
Depending on where you go and who you ask, tags are implemented differently, and even defined in their own unique way. Even more importantly, tags were meant to be universal and compatible: a medium of sharing and conveying info across the blogosphere — the very embodiment of a semantic web. Unfortunately, they're not. Far from it, tags create more discord and confusion than they do minimize it.
I have to say, it would be nice to just learn one way of tagging content and using it everywhere.""
Isn't the power of tags that you can tag stuff however you want? To me a standard for tagging would be a negative thing.
I don't thing the problem is a standard for tagging, the problem is having a standard for sharing tags between applications. But that's another problem and it doesn't need to be solved to implement tagging itself.
I'm inclined to disagree that 'tags' are the answer here. I wrote my masters thesis on a method automatically generating semantic webs from plaintext. It's a huge problem with about a dozen different stages, but I had backing in all of my research from the psycholinguistics and computer-science field.
;-)
Herein lies the rub: You're never going to get everyone to agree on a set of appropriate tags. Even if you do, you'll never have them uniformly applied (well I find that humorous but you have it tagged as inappropriate).
There are other solutions here, such as automatic semantic generation. Hey, I never said it was an easy solution, but it's one that I'm certain can be accomplished. Flame away
Is not to tag everything like 13 year old cheerleaders.
How do you standardize something that has not been widely implemented before? It's great to say that it would be good idea to have one standard practice for tagging, but which one? There's no reason to make a huge fuss about this until it a least one clear contender for standardization emerges (which will probably happen on its own).
Er, I mean notatrap!
One big problem is that people can just make them up, then you get the "greifers" who put bogus joke tags all over the place.
(remember, the opposite of "itsatrap" is "!itsatrap", not "notatrap"!)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
How to share and categorize information is an ages old problem. One man's trash is another man's treasure, likewise, one man's bread is another man's dietary problem.
I'm not sure, but haven't we already figured out that tagging would require more tags than the actual information being tagged to accomplish what the original poster was asking for?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Why not use an XML standard? If sites used a or similar, then people could put whatever they wanted inside. It would be simple for automated tools and users to find the tags and search against them. One of the most useful things that are similar to tags is the alt field in img. It allows people to search for photos online. Of course, this is open to abuse like anything else, and weren't search engines based on meta tags in the header at one point until people took advantage of them? Still, if tags are going to be standardized, I think it should be through a mark-up standard, and allows people to be as creative as they want with the actual tag itself.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
A tagging standard isn't needed. Tags are just keyword that describe something. They're *WORDS* for Christs's sake. Just screen scrape them if you have to. Put them in a database. Read them aloud with a British accent, if you'd like. But if you can't parse plain old words, then I don't think that any kind of "standard" is going to help you.
In the article, this guy is saying that some tags have spaces in them, and some don't, so that makes it hard. How about "where lcase(tags) like '%vista%'? How hard is that?
This guy is an idiot.
I don't feel that tags have enough significance behind them to merit a standard. I'd be more concerned with truth in journalism first, for my part.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Trying to standardize tags in the context of standardizing what they are, is hopeless. It'll be like the Unicode standard; too complex to use in its entirety.
But to standardize the format of tags and to standardize how to exchange tags between systems, is a great idea.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Which is why I tagged this article with "njkewjdkewd."
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
He said "blogosphere." Instantly, I don't care.
Only thing worse would be something like, I dunno, "tags should be a Web 2.0 standard" or somesuch.
Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important?
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled - R Feynman
Would make tagging almost useless. There are many different ways you can view one thing and to limit the expressions used to tag something limits the possibilities of communication. On the other hand leaving the tags available as open ended can turn out to be redundant, you may as well just tag something as its complete description. Perhaps the best way would just be to let people make up their own minds.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
...or is he just another controlfreak whose article was tagged with vocabulary he didn't expect.
Tagging (and Wikipedia) don't need your rules. You can always close your eyes if you don't like it.
On the other side I know Zonk would be desperate to censor tag vocabulary like "stupid", "lame", "FUD" and (of course) "No".
I must say that the Slashdot way of tagging irks me. I think tags should have hyphens between words, much like they do in their "from the the-slow-down dept". Makes it more readable.s as who knows what analbum is?
Any-tagging-stuff-I-have-to-write-will-use-hyphen
Get your own free personal location tracker
Deleted
You're never going to get everyone to agree on a set of appropriate tags.
Then how come everyone on here has agreed on a handful of standard tags:
?????
transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
and here I thought the standard for tagging was for the first person to agree or disagree with the headline, then the next has to immediately disagree with the first person. 5 minutes down the line if no one has added another tag, the third must disgree with BOTH the first and the second poster. Finally, a serious slashdotter will show up to add a relevant tag, followed by the oh so frequent itsatrap and slownewsday tags.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Tags are human assigned labels for something that we don't have better meta-data for, or where we don't want to be bothered with formalism. If you want something formal, go use a proper taxonomy/ontology and put bucketloads of OWL or RDF-schema data on your site to define relationships, or use format with well defined semantics to add information. Noone is stopping you, and there are cases where formally defining relationships is worthwhile, such as when you want software agents to be able to infer stuff about the data. But that's not what tagging is used for. Tagging is used for ad-hoc manual classification in situations where it is good enough
Similar to how XML uses XSLT to transform XML documents from one application to another, it wouldn't be a half-bad idea to have a Tag Transformation Language. Organizations with a lot of market share can define their own tag standards, and then people can optionally specify the transformation between their own local ontologies and the established tag standards. This has the advantage of being participation-driven.
And while we're at it, we should get everyone to agree to speak the same language and believe in the same religion!
Fanatically anti-fanatical
such a shame we can't tag _everything_ in our everyday life :/ the world is in dischord, because we have no set standard scheme for tagging everything around us with the opinions of OTHERS rather than building our own.. stupid dimwit..
This is what RDF is for. You distinguish between your idea of the "fud" tag and somebody else's idea of the "fud" tag because the relationships are expressed as URIs. You refer to the subjects of the tagging with URIs too, meaning that you don't need special tagging behaviour built into whatever you are tagging - you just need a URI to point to. And because you can put an RDF file anywhere, it's totally decentralised.
This has already beeen designed and implemented in Amaya and Annotea by the W3C. The correct place to solve this is in the client, not in each individual website.
Tagging, like anything else designed to be helpful, simply won't work if *anything* is allowed. For every person who tags something "correctly" in an effort to do good, how many people will deliberately mis-tag something to produce misleading results?
:)
Better to get rid of tagging altogether and go back to text searching!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
...not to tag everything like 13 year old cheerleaders. Otherwise you may find yourself in a living room Stone Phillips.First of all tags are not exclusive to the blogosphere - they exist on the boardscape (see boardtracker for example) and of course on the many social nets and pretty much everywhere else.
There are already microformats for defining tags which can and should be used.
Tags are for building a folksonomy and created 'by the people' so are by their nature, to a certain extent, personalized and flexible.. what makes sense to you may make no sense to everyone else but so what? You made it, its good for you and thats good enough.. however chances are it will make sense to some other people anyway, no matter what or how you tag, so its all good.
The Annotea Project is a W3C project that ties together standards that allow attaching metadata to web pages without altering the contents of the object.
The Amaya web browser/editor is a W3C project that serves as a testbed for the consortium's standards - including an annotea implimentation (the most interesting part of the project imho).
Basically, you can keep your own local metadata, or have a central shared resource with that implimentation. Of course, you could build your own implimentation that has other properties (merging/sharing annotations/tags etc...)
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Someone should patent tagging, license it out for a small cost and enforce a standard...
I've talked to librarians and information scientists, and they talk about "controlled vocabulary". They told me one of the best systems was Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi which is an index of essentially every article published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Every article is "tagged" with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords, and you can search the database for those keywords. If they can use "heart" or "cardiac", they have to decide which one to use (they use "cardiac"). They have keywords to separate human studies from animal studies. Here's more explanation http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html It's basically open source.
A similar system in law is the Westlaw key word system. The New York Times used to have a great keyword index, but I can't find it in the NYT online.
Even if there was a tagging standard, the choice of tag(s) will still be up to the people applying the tags. Different people will have different interpretations.
Just look at how well Genres worked out for MP3-ID3, especially on services like Gracenote where people would just upload any old cruft.
Hmmm .... I've got an idea--Why doesn't every one simply use the Library of Congress Subject Headings, or if you are French-speaking, RVM, or if you are Spanish Speaking--BIDEX. What? too restrictive? Not relevant? We don't like no stinkin' control.
If you allow uncontrolled assignement of "tags" (aka keywords) you will get junk. Some people will be conscientious and try to do a good job, some will be "cute" and tag will the latest slang for their domain; some will take advantage and tag for their own nefarious purposes. You will have to deal with the junk/crud/cruft.
If you impose some sort of control, you will have to deal with those who will flame about the restrictions, you will have to deal with endless discussion on what the correct "tag" is for any given subject and whether or not it offends some group or not.
There is a term for this area of endeavour--Library Science! There has been discussion and work going on related to the web and indexing schemes for at least 10 years. try searching for "Network Knowledge Organization Schemes" or some variant.
I'm surprised this isn't already common practice, but why not implement tag searching in a LikeMinds scheme. For example, when you're looking for items tagged "funny", you would be shown items that have been tagged as such by people who in the past have tagged things the same way you have. This way you have a better chance of finding things that really are funny to you, based on what you thought was funny in the past.
Obviously though this would do nothing for Slashdot's tagging system which has (probably unintentionally) become a micro-comment system -- in the way, for example, that people tag articles whose titles are questions with yes/no answer tags.
The only useful evolution of tags I can see is to give it a dot format, general to specific, such as:
->USA.Nevada.LasVegas
->Literature.HunterThompson
Similar to OOP coding or Usenet. But, you wouldn't want to set a fixed standard, you would want it to evolve as it's used.
Rather than a standard, allowing people to use partial hierarchies might be enough for a sophisticated algorithm to figure out when tags mean approximately the same thing (given a large set of data).
For example, given the example of Windows Vista from the article, tags indicating partial hierarchies might look like "software/windows vista" or "windows/vista". The first tag could be interpreted as: both the tags "software" and "windows vista", and that the tag "windows vista" is a sub-tag of "software".
I've heard rumors of software that is capable of analyzing tags for large collections of objects to determine which tags are related and even make guesses as to when different tags mean the same thing. Allowing users to also say that one tag is a sub-tag of another might be enough to create full tag hierarchies and improve the ability to guess when two tags mean the same thing.
The one time that tags were really useful to me were when I was asked to implement rounded corners on the portlets of a web page, and I was looking at what other people had done. I didn't find exactly what I was looking for until I checked del.icio.us for 'rounded' and found lots of other ways of rounding the corners of web content.
I've been asked to implement tags on an existing discussion site, and I'm afraid it's going to turn out as poorly as the tags on slashdot. Unless the tagging system is used by people in a way that's meaningful to them, the quality of the tags is going to be poor.
The tags have to fill a need for categorization, and there have to be people interested in those categories, then it will get used widely, and turn into something that even newcomers to the site would use.
So far, del.icio.us has done well, because the tags are 'mine' and they mean what I want them to mean, and they categorize my bookmarks, I know what to expect when I use them.
In a huge pile of similar things, like flickr, tags are the only categories that outsiders can use to narrow what they're interested in without text search.
Tags are truly implemented differently based on the role that they serve. There's no way to standardize yet. If they were standardized, how would one site use the tags on another site? What would all the use-cases be? There's also no way to ensure quality of tags are accurate and thorough. Text search is reliable because it looks at the content itself. Has text search been standardized? I think not.
Search and tags are web services that are exposed in different ways from different sites, for different purposes and that's about the best we can hope for for the time being.
Celebrate Excellence!
I just RTFA and apparently the biggest problem is whether you type your tags as "Windows Vista","Piece Of Crap" or Windows_Vista,Piece_Of_Crap or WindowsVista,PieceOfCrap, so that people who put tags on D.e.li.cio.us might get confused when putting tags on technofarti.com. Spaces? Quotes? Delimeters? Oh my. What shall we do.
Basically, people are too dumb/lazy/stupid to read a one-line description of how to format their tags. How confusing can it be? You just show people how to do it in the form, e.g.
Tags [ ] (eg dogs, "border collies", barking)
or
Tags [ ] (eg dogs,border_collies,barking)
or
Tags [ ] (eg dogs,borderCollies,barking)
Now, do we need a standard, OR do we need people to be able to read instructions? Note that one of these choices is a specific, set-in-stone piece of information, the other is a general piece of advice that people would do well to follow for most of their lives (although being able to read instructions is no guarantee that following them is a good idea).
Libraries have had a similar problem, for the past hundred years of so.
Here is a book. Where do you put the book in the library, and how do
you classify it so as to make it maximally useful for your [*] patrons?
[*] That's important! Your patrons are distinct from mine!
You can order all the books in the collection
by accession date (when you got the book).
You can order all the books by author's last name.
You can order all the books by title.
You can order all the books by subject. If you do this, you can use
Dewey classification, LC classification, or something else.
Suppose you just stick with LC classification.
Even two libraries that have the same book, and both use LC
classification, say, may classify a book differently. Say you
have an AI book that is *the* seminal text covering how to do
clustering via fuzzy logic. Do you put this with all the AI books?
with all the clustering books? with all the fuzzy logic books?
(and all three sets of books may be in different places.)
Tagging content on the web represents a similar situation. If you
use a 'standard term' to tag a text, different sets of users /
customers / readers may not associate that 'standard term' with
the meaning you intended. A given term or phrase can be 'classified'
(library science term) or placed into different categories of meaning,
depending on context.
I think that the original poster's statement ("Tagging was intended to
be universal and standardized") either shows great naivete or hubris
on the part of the unstated "intenders". Context is the key. Any
one and his dog can come up with a standardized tagging scheme, but
users of it will nonetheless adopt it (or not) based on the scheme's
ability to classify information in a way that works for the adopter.
What prospective adopters want, however, is not a straighjacket that
forces them to classify web pages in a way that the adopter's users
won't understand and won't use.
---a former AI researcher
Quick, somebody tag this article "Yes".
I think this 'standard' already exists...
I think by "blogosphere", you really mean "internet".
Let's create a committee to discuss the standard, and send out several RFCs, then split off into an angry sub-contingent that insists tags be open-source and then Sun decides to embrace tags, but screws it up, and Microsoft buys its way into tags and engineers a perfect way to pwn your machine through the tag "1337."
Don't forget to make it structured, with methods and types and blah blah blah.
It's just words, fer chrissakes. When you can tell me the difference between "its" and "it's" then you can talk about standards for words. Until then, PLEASE let's not have another standards war over something trivial that is supposed to save the world but will only serve to confuse everyone, all over again.
- When your tag contains more than one word, separate them with an underscore, rather than a hyphen or a space
for an example. Of course it would be foolish to standardize which tags are "valid" or not, since this would destroy the whole concept of tagging. For that kind of purpose we have directories, like Yahoo! or DMOZ.Er Galvão Abbott - IT Consultant and Developer
RSS readers are ubiquitous. Generating custom RSS feeds from content is trivial on the server side. Building an RSS reader to pull tag information from another site into tagging software is trivial. The only thing that people need to do is to build it into their tagging engines so that their customers can easily find related information. The last thing I want to do, however, is to have things "suggested" to me. Why should del.icio.us and Technorati automatically be integrated? Leave that to the user.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
One big problem is that you need to provide translations for all these tags in a large range of language...
There is a standard but nobody uses it these days. Even the search engines disavow it anymore.
If someone gets started on a tagging standard right now, it might see a little use before the whole silly idea goes out of style next year.
I don't care so much about the actual tags themselves. Letting people tag however they like is the whole point, isn't it?
But I would like to see a single standard API for adding tags and searching for tags. The exact same code should be able to connect to every tag-enabled site. A nice simple REST thing, an HTTP GET to send a query and an XML fragment as result.
I figure there would be two types of query:
1) Send an object identifier (URL, photo id, whatever) and get back a list of tags.
2) Send a tag or list of tags, possibly wildcarded, and get back a list of object identifiers.
I'm a big fan of tags. I just recently got finished with a redesign of a personal web site at RockyMusic.org, and it uses tags heavily now. All of the content including photos, MP3s, videos, song lyrics, external links, documents, albums, individual tracks, and so on uses the same set of tags (which I applied). I can then use those tags to tie everything on the site together. Examples: Richard O'Brien, Little Nell, Rocky Horror Show. Since I did all the tagging, it's consistent across all the content as well.
That's a case I think where a tagging "standard" would not be at all useful, since making it non-standard is the primary reason it works well I think. Slashdot and other sites that use user-generated tags will always see a lot of humorous, insulting, and otherwise unuseful tags. I know I've seen photos of girls tagged "butter face", and Slashdot obviously has its own cults of "itsatrap", "slownewsday", and so on. Some that are specific to Slashdot ("slashvertisement") are quite useful though.
That way one group can label their tags ( e.g. Microsoft:embrace_and_extend ) and others can submit their own tags (e.g. slashdot:itsatrap).
This is labor intensive and is not a universal solution, but its a partial solution
Two issues here.
One is the "standard" of representation. Tags are not like a contact lists or meta data laden resource indexes. They're just words, an array of strings. If your favorite language can figure out how to go from, say, "tag1, tag2" to "array('tag1','tag2')" you have bigger problems than standards.
The other issue is defining a universal, standard, taxonomy. From Dewey to RDF, we're no closer now than we ever were. You're asking people to all come to an agreement as to how they view the world. Good luck with that.
You mean XML doesn't solve this problem? Blasphemy!
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Is the author talking about an interoperable API or application specific tagging implementations? For our app, we limit a single alphanumeric tag to be listed via the web front end because we store the tags char delimited in a db field. If the guy is talking about a web API then I'd suggest something with ATOM/Microformats and we'd oblige with a parallel dataset. user-classified content flies in the face of established hierarchical information architecture, if someones going to start applying rules they need to make sure they don't kill the goose!
Tagging itself is something of a none issue for us, marking up a cloud is a major problem. What do you guys think of using h1 through h6 to mark up a tag cloud? Currently we use spans with CSS font-size decs but it's not possible to convey weighting information for the cloud in an accessible way. The options are to abuse the header element or offer an alternate ordered list.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 18.html
The only tags I like are my own. The real use of other people's tags is to show how they organize information, not to help me find something. The problems the article brings up are only the beginning -- the natural tendency of a global tagging system is for the number of tags applied to an object to increase without bound. If I'm doing a master's thesis on, say, web design, I might tag any number of sites "thesis". Is that useful to anyone else? Probably not. But it will interfere with someone who's searching for sites about writing theses.
Visit the
So while ago, there was an agreed standard for web metadata, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative aka ISO Standard 15836-2003. Very few people use it.
Tagging? Who cares? Gimme my pr0n....
Seriously, I don't tag, I don't care and I don't want to care.
I'm not going to change anytime soon and I bet there are a lot more of me then you.
This is one of the few days where I can tell I look like a troll, but this is exactly how I feel about the subject. I guess I'm an angry person.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
First of all, the quote is by Feynman, who was a physicist, not a manager.
Second, I'm not sure where you see buzzwords in it, because I can't. It's a simple idea expressed in plain English, which is something a lot of PHBs and PR drones seem to have forgotten how to do.
Third, it's a very sane and simple advice to everyone (including scientists, engineers, managers, marketting, etc): you can't make technology by PR announcement. You can run the PR machine as long as you want that water really runs uphill, it won't convince nature to actually behave that way. You can't just rewrite the laws of physics, and if you try, don't be surprised if nature still behaves the old fashioned way. So if you want to build something that works, put your faith in how the world actually works, not in how much PR crap you can churn stating the opposite.
At any rate, it actually has a meaning.
Most of us have a beef with buzzwords that really don't have any meaning, or no extra meaning over a simpler everyday word. Whole paragraphs or whole memos, mission statements, etc, get written that don't actually tell you anything. That is the problem.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"tagging, no, tag, tags, njkewjdkewd (tagging beta)" :) And interesting. And perhaps insightful.
Somebody mod the tags +funny.
We've got a standard for keywords in HTML documents. There's no problem there.
The only issue is what to do when there are multiple sub-documents on a single page, like if Slashdot allowed individual replies to be tagged.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I think for me the moment I realized that the idea of tags needed a little bit of work was the day I saw them on Amazon.com. I was viewing a product there, and it had been tagged "Presents for Jim".
Herding cats would be eaiser... What about a tagging system for the tags themselves? That would be fun!
____ plex
The only thing missing from tagging is search. The API is standard already, (Flickr -> pictures, del.icio.us -> Resource Sites, News Sites: News)
I would love to have a tag option in Google.
As many people noted in this discussion, it's really hard to get everyone to agree on a standard tagging scheme. There are, however, good schemes for classifying content that can be used to standardize classification. Those include: controlled vocabularies (flat lists), taxonomies (trees) (e.g. Dewey, LC), ontologies, and topic maps[*] (graph-like structures). As you see the tagging model can be as simple as a list, or as complex as a graph of concepts with their associated relationships. Regardless of which scheme you use, you should use it within a metadata standard (e.g. Dublin Core, IEEE LOM), by allowing the subject field of the metadata record to take values only from the used classification scheme.
If a standard classification scheme is used, coupled with a metadata standard, I say we're much closer to having more consistent distributed content classification than with ad-hoc tagging.
[*] Check this article on "Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making sense of it all" by Lars Marius Garshol from Ontopia.
Tags don't belong on the interweb, and neither does Al Gore.
I think there definitely should be a standard of classifying information: we have huge masses of people classifying information they encounter on the web, it's the human equivalent of SETI. And therefore it would be a shame if we didn't allow people to take it one step further and give everyone the ability to do it "right" (for their particular version of right).
:)
I am not opposing the free-style tagging, as many people wouldn't bother with any formal definitions, but having a standard so you can optionally use ontologies (predefined, or create an ontology yourself!) as a reference for what exactly you mean would be great. The tag could still be displayed as it's string representation, but would store exactly what meaning the original tagger intended. And can therefore be searched for more easily.
It'd be relatively easy to store a bit of RDF for every tag which specifies whether it's a wild tag or a "precise" reference to a phrase in an ontology. As one poster said especially the content creators might want to use this feature, and the consumers can still do however they want.
Sounds like a win-win situation to me
-Tiemen
A tagging standard? Never gonna happen. Probably not even possible.
Some words have more than one meaning in English alone, and different meanings throughout the different versions of English, then you can add in foreign languages too.
Take for example the words "strip" or "ass" as an example (um, not sure why those came into my head first...). Search for "ass" and you get things about donkeys, amongst a variety of more or less interesting things. My guess is that the few mental patients searching for donkeys are as upset as those of us looking for more interesting things.
Tags work on trust. For the most part they work 30%-40% of the time as they are on a bad day. There is plenty of tag spamming going on, and that's only going to get worse if standards are "enforced". God knows how anyone could enforce this, gaming tags is a piece of cake.
I'm not clear why the web 2.0 tagerazzi ever thought tags were going to work in the first place. It is essentially the system that search engines used before Google. It failed miserably in many cases, being the reason why Google was successful - they moved away from tags to search algorithms that worked much much much better.
Does everyone really have such short memories? Or is it really 1996 and I'm living in my own solipsism?
See http://xfml.org/.
Google Facet Classification for a more in depth study of the idea.
I've thought for along time that the Internet (search engines in particular) is screaming for the equiv. of a Dewey Decimal system. I think the blog categorization taxonomy is an extension of that need...
The rel-tag microformat is an attempt to standardise tagging. It relies on other microformats to define what it is you are tagging. There isn't a 'photo' microformat at the moment, so you can't do a web-wide search for photos tagged 'fireworks' for example. If you're interested in the semantic web it's worth checking out microformats. You can download a plugin for firefox that reads microformats. Go and have a look at Flickr with it, or any other site that implements microformats. If people have tagged something with a 'geo' tag giving long. and lat. then it will bring up a Google Map showing the location. If they've included a 'hCard' around their contact details you can add it to your address book.
If you have a set standard tags, you still need people to apply them consistently. In practice, this can be done much more consistently by using machine learning techniques. You have a set of documents with agreed-upon tagging as your training set.
for those interested in a "tagging standard" for the semantic web (i.e. an ontology describing the concept of tagging) check out:
-ukio
No two people have the same meaning for a given word. It's no surprise that experts disagree on word meanings when defining "ontologies" (dictionaries, really) for the WWW. Herein lies a problem that AI continues to wrestle with.
Meanwhile the village fool, W3C's Tim Berners-Lee, continues to insist that nothing's wrong and that his Semantic Web effort will save the world and the children.
A dictionary.
There are people who live and die by tagging their information. They build folders and create lists.
There are people who just go through life serendipitously. They never use the laundry hamper and most people call them slobs.
Between these two groups are the rest of humanity. Sometimes they make lists and sometimes they don't. And just because the word, "librarian," strikes a fear of boredom, most people ignore library sciences. The science of tagging, if to be used as a global panacea, must be approached or studied to be feasible and usable over generations.
Tags and Keywords are the same thing, just different names.
Wouldn't it be nice to have tagging as an integral part of a filesystem, filetype unaware. Imagine a picasa-like desktop experience. Lush
You can't mod tags, but I wish I could mod the tag "njkewjdkewd" that someone added to this article as funny.
Unless they figure out that the things you call 'thesis' are useful.
I do this all the time on del.icio.us.
- Find a page that is likely to be bookmarked by anyone doing academia on web design
- Use the "others who have bookmarked this page" function to get a list of other users
who have tagged the URL in question.
- See anybody using the tag 'thesis'? You probably want to see what else they've tagged that way.
If you're lucky, you just saved yourself a butt load of research.
Tags allow people to usefully keep track of thousands of things with almost no cognitive cost.
No other system lets you do that. This is why everyones favorites list is a mess.
Right then, I appoint myself founder and overlord of the Internet Expositor of Tagging Formats, and I here propose a draft standard. Comments are requested.
1) Don't call them "tags". Tagging is what chavs with three ASBOs do to the back of buildings. They're called "labels".
2) Underscores and camel case are fine for programming, but not for humans. Therefore, we allow spaces.
3) Multiple labels give us a list. What do we separate lists with? Commas, of course!
4) In the future, we may invent some "magic" tags that work as key:value pairs. What words do what magic is out of the scope of this standard.
5) Implementors MUST NOT use the word "blogosphere" or the phrase "Web 2.0" again ever.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Juice, Blythe, Wally, Captain Mancini, Dodger, Garbage Pail kids,
I've started to run into this problem myself from using del.icio.us as my primary bookmark source. One of my current issues is not what tags other people are using, but what tags I am using. Currently I have a lot of overlapping tags. I did some cleanup lately so that 'photos' and 'photo' are in a single tag, etc.
I started to look around and found there have been a lot of standardizations of topic maps. Although intended more for very large systems (think government sized systems categorizing millions of documents). The UK government has a topic system called the e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS). The schema is browsable online. Another good article is The TAO of Topic Maps (also in pdf)
I think there should be a basic standard to avoid situations like the photo/photos tags above. But I think that should be as far as it goes. The good thing about tagging on most sites is you are not limited. The bad thing about tagging on most sites is you are not limited.
Furthermore, Tags have a more flexible approach--as you recognize is needed--than simple document-level meta-data; they can be applied to specific entities on a page instead of the entire page itself. Not only that, but tags vs. header meta-data seem to target two different groups: search engines and people. How many times do you View Page Source to get information about a specific object on the page or the page itself? Not to mention that only the maintainer of the document even likely has access to the meta-data, where on the other hand with tags any user can contribute at any time leaving the potential for a much more robust set of information.
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
No, you can (and certainly should) access each and every comment in its own URL. So you may put a synthesis of all comments tags plus the article tags on the complete article itself, and comment tags only on comments urls.
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Some general GUIDELINES for tagging could be helpful for cross-user findability. I don't see a need for a standard at this point but clever search tools for the tag space are definitely missing. For example, to search for items with two words in a defined order users have to guess the tags of other users, e.g. hard drive: hard::drive, hard_drive, hard-drive). Using a small set of main tags and the concept of ordered tags has some advantages (more details: http://tdot.blog-city.com/advanced_tagging_with_or dered_tags.htm).
META keywords provides keywords for a page.
The better, more relevant standard for tagging is the rel-tag microformat, http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag
You put a rel="tag" attribute on a hyperlink to the page on Del.icio.us or whatever that defines the tag. The microformats.org page succinctly explains the benefits of this approach.
It even explains how to encode spaces and special characters. So there's NO issue with the envelope or format, except that Del.icio.us (or is it Technorati?) doesn't like spaces in tag names.
As for the *content* of tags, yeah they're unavoidably a disorganized mess. Eggheads who know about ontology and RDF say they can't work. But they do, sort-of.
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That's fine and all, but I really have no idea why you are telling me any of this.
I am not arguing that there should be a standard for tags!
I haven't taken a stance one way or another, I was merely pointing out in my original post that the suggestion of, "screw tags, we have the meta HTML element that works with keywords", is an impractical idea that currently serves to solve a different problem.
Furthermore, I believe you too are confused. The article isn't asking, "Should we create a new system for detailing the contents of an entity on a web-page?". It is asking, "Should we create a standard naming convention for the system that has already been created that details the contents of an entity on a web-page, so as to create interoperability between disparate websites that use tagging systems?" The idea is to keep the meaning of the tag the same, while letting different websites use the same information and collect data under the same headings.
P.S. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
A tagging standard???
This article makes some succinct points about the fallacy of relying too-much on metadata.
I find tags useful for personal collections, but it breaks down because my mental map is different from anyone else's. Heck, I'm often inconsistent from day to day (sometimes I use UPPERCASE_CONSTANTS, sometimes camelCaseConstants, etc)
Read the book Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. He addresses tagging and the semantic web.
I guess that's the point.
BTW: I find it amusing that CmdrTaco uses the slownewsday tag
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
I still maintain that the keywords already implemented as part of HTML metadata are no more impractical than a reimplementation of the same thing but named "tags" would be.
If the original suggestion is that there ought to be a standard ontology for tags, then (a) it would have been nice if it could have been more clearly expressed, and (b) fat chance, even DCMI hasn't attempted that.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If you use hyphens as a replacement for spaces how do you show a hyphen ... what does mother-in-law-school mean (my mothers gone to law school || a school to teach mother-in-laws how to keep shtum and do the dishes :o)> )
I prefer underscores — then hyphens can be kept for their proper purpose.