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

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.

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: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.