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).
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
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
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Words have spaces between them. A tag may have multiple words and be an independent thought. Store it as English demands, with spaces. The Space, NoSpace question is only relevant if you are using an encoding scheme that is broken. Verb/Noun is a different question, but space/nospace, quotes, and BS like that is quickly solved with existing technology.
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.
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.
Yeah, I agree. I personally feel tags are hyped way beyond their actual worth. I couldn't care less about 'conveying info across the blogosphere', but I'm genuinely interested in organising my own information neater (e.g. my bookamrks).
Look at gmail, frinstance. Labels replace folders, and a mail can have more than one label. More importantly, they're predefined, and the interface doesn;t really allow you to be prolific with your tagging.
Compare this with the crappy way del.icio.us allows you to put a billion tags for each link, and I can see why its such a mess.
I agree with others here that something like tagging oughtn't to be standardised or they'll lose their whole purpose, but really, there are other reasonable solutions that atleast help in atleast reducing the amount of craptagging going on. I've experimented with Blinklist and del.icio.us, and my bookmarks in the former are far better tagged because I can actually see my existing tags while bookmarking a new site.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Um, no. I don't care what the FAQ says; "!itsatrap" is hard to distinguish from "itsatrap." Maybe it works in monospaced code, but not so well in proportional font.
People who insist on sticking to the fucking rules are the number one problem facing today's society, methinks.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
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
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".
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
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.
for those interested in a "tagging standard" for the semantic web (i.e. an ontology describing the concept of tagging) check out:
-ukio
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.
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.
folksonomical While I agree with your sentiment, I believe you are incorrect. Search engines specifically disregard keywords from the Meta HTML element found nested in the Head element of a page. Alternatively and because there is no penultimate tagging format, search engines do not discern the difference between normal page content and folksonomical tags. Furthermore, the discussion is not about whether or not to standardize the interface, but rather just to create a common formatting of certain types of tags. I also find it hilarious that the parents of all my posts in this article are ranked high but the actual content of the parents are based on incorrect assumptions as to the purpose of the article. Oh wait, that's right, it's slashdot.
"Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience."
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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