Fred On Something'sComments

PC Forum Roundtable on Tagging

Scribbles from a session led by David Weinberger and Esther Dyson at PC Forum, also posted to the wiki.

Lots of productive friction here.

David Sifry, Caterina Fake and Ross Mayfield helped with an intro to tagging. (can’t remember what I said, please edit in)

Rael Dornfest: reminds me of RDF, but the cooling is its not in format or intent

David Weinberger: Take that semantic web! We will do it ourselves with tags!

Barney Pell: tags vs. models or inference rules.
[…]

—JP Rangaswami: Was going to use tags to solve a problem in my organization. people label things differently in different cultures in the same organization. Today english might be the language, but there are perhaps 300 dialects and the labels are different. Tagging lets structure to cross-reference, where patterns emerge. Important for me in a commercial context. To let people in diff keeping it simpel and the adoption rate high. Not pushing or pulling, its a community, which is why I like social software.—

I don’t think that tags will answer to this question. Two words, in the same language, can have the same meaning. Two words, in two different languages, can also have the same meaning. Tagging can’t cope with this reality. Tag can’t be an end in itself. We need something to wrap it to give it more semantic power. It’s why languages like RDF, RDFS and OWL have been created: to add semantic power to resources, any type of resources: words, links, photos, images, movies, a car; anything can be a resource.