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.""

Comments

Don't agree

[pubjames]

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.

Re:Don't agree

[lousehr]

Your analysis of "the problem" is exactly the point of TFA. The stated concern is not that the content of the tags has no standard, but that the format of the tags has no standard. If a single tag contains multiple words, should the words be separated by spaces or underscores, or should we use StudlyCaps?

Re:Don't agree

[radtea]

The stated concern is not that the content of the tags has no standard, but that the format of the tags has no standard.

The medium, as Marshall Maclluhan said, is the message. As soon as you standardize the format of the tags you will restrict the kind of information people can convey with them. That may be an acceptable limitation to you, but not to others, and they will find workarounds that effectively break the standard.

For example, if tags were standardized on underscores to separate words you would have to forbid spaces and caps to enforce that standard. And then we would have no way of distinguishing between Polish and polish, which would be bad if you were looking for things to do with Eastern European culture or furniture care products. People would then start doing things like expressing capitalization by some other syntactical hack which would be inconsistently applied and a greater mess would ensue.

Alternatively, tags could be represented as more complex markup:
<tag>
<word order="1">really</word>
<word order="2">stupid</word>
</tag>

But because words and concepts have no general one-to-one correspondence (many words do not convey a unique concept or a concept at all, and many concepts cannot be conveyed in one word) this would be inadequate, and in any case even if the content model of the "word" tag forbade spaces, caps and underscores, people would still create tags that looked like:

<tag><word>reallystupid</word></tag>

The basic idea of "semantic markup" is wrong. From the summary:

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.

Actually, tags as they stand are the very embodiment of the semantic web. The only function of the semantic web is to create confusion and discord, because confusion and discord is the essence of the human epistemological condition. And the call for "one way of doing X" has a nice religious ring to it, history shows that attempts to standardize things relating to human thought are very much misguided.

Automatic tagging

[drcoppersmith]

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 ;-)

Re:Automatic tagging

[maxume]

The article is mostly talking about standardizing the envelope, not the message, which is to say, how do you share/create a two word tag, and how to you specify exactly what is supposed to be described by that tag, and how do you share that in a useful way.

The fact that someone thinks something is funny and someone else thinks it is inappropriate is useful information to gather, if you get 5000 funny and 5 inappropriate, you have a lot more information than if you have nothing at all, but even in you get 10 and 10 you still have more information, which is probably a good thing.

One Key Point

[Azarael]

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).

Didn't they have this problem in Babel?

[zappepcs]

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?

People actually pay that much attention to tags?

[east coast]

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.

Hopeless

[bigmouth_strikes]

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.

I'm fired, aren't I?

[elzahir]

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?

Re:Hyphens.

[Chryana]

I would add to this that slashdot tags tend to be not very useful.

Most of the time, the tags have little to do with the actual article (eg. yes, no, maybe, fud, notfud, flamebait). I thought the purpose of tags was to be able to find an article easily later on when it has been archived, and the usefulness of the tags I just mentioned for this purpose is dubious at best. I do not pretend to have a solution to this problem, but I think the situation would be improved if the editors or maybe the /.ers who wrote the top rated comment where the only people allowed to set the tags.