Fred On Something'sComments

Folksonomies at Etech

“A transcript from a talk with Clay, Stewart, Joshua and Jimmy.

Clay: Not a debate about the meaning of folksonomy. This is about allowing a large group of users in on organizing a large volume of material. this is usually a function of professionals, why did you do this and what have you observed:

Jimmy: launched in June, didn’t have software to support it before. First few weeks was a madhouse in English. Germans held off but then the floodgates opened with order. Became more sensible as people adjusted the categories. We let the masses categorizes because its the crazy wikipedia way.

Stewart: Activity is for the individual first. Because of the word folksonomy, people assume it is for categorization.

[…]”

two days ago I blogged about the problem of tags and proposed a partial, intuitive, solution provided by semantic web:

“[…]

How could we upgrade the tagging idea to get rid of such feature and remove a part of the responsibility of the tagging authors in the whole process? I think that the principles of the semantic web would help us to upgrade the tagging idea.

How would this work? Intuitively it would work like this:

1. Consider the group of tags that describe a resource as a resource in itself.

2. Systems like Technorati would scan posts to extract these “tag resource”.

3. After the system would semantically link all these “tag resource” according to an ontology to relate, semantically, each “tag resources”.

4. Finally when a user would make a tag search query, results would not only be the resources with the specific tag but also all the other resources according to the semantic of the tag(s) searched.

[…]”