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The Need For A Tagging Standard

Posted by Hemos on from the tagging-joy dept.

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.""

4 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Automatic tagging by mangu · · Score: 4, Informative
    I wrote my masters thesis on a method automatically generating semantic webs from plaintext.


    In the end, this could be said to be one of the central problems in AI. Basically, this is dimensionality reduction. People have been trying to do this manually for a long time. The Encyclopaedia Britannica's Propaedica is an example of a tentative semantic web for all human knowledge, but it's so inefficient that it's of very little use by a human, not to mention by automatic mechanisms.


    You're never going to get everyone to agree on a set of appropriate tags ... There are other solutions here, such as automatic semantic generation


    I believe it could be done if it were an automatically generated tag set. If it could be proven mathematically optimal in a certain context, it would be hard for anyone to disagree.

  2. Too many chefs, etc. by Pope · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  3. Re:The other option by jZnat · · Score: 5, Informative

    !itsatrap

    That's existed since tags started, so problem solved!

    --
    'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
  4. tagging "standards" for the semantic web by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    hey guys,

    for those interested in a "tagging standard" for the semantic web (i.e. an ontology describing the concept of tagging) check out:


    -ukio