The human indexed web – needs organisation
While I think it is great that we can tag the web with our own tags, creating our own folksonomy. How do we know which tag to use? I could tag my posts just for the sake of tagging them, but really I want to tag my posts so that they appear with other like minded posts. In which case I need to know what other people have tagged their posts as.
This is all very well if I have spent some time on other people’s blogs seeing what’s what, but what if I haven’t? What if I have just come across some new concept or thought stream that I want to talk about and fire off a quick post? How do I know that I am using a tag that will mean something to other people? How do I know whether to use “Library2.0″ or “Library 2.0″?
What we need (I feel another web service coming on..) is a way of getting all the tags that do exist, perhaps If we could appropriate them from technorati and del.ic.io.us, and merge them into a central place. Then the community could look up a term (descriptor) and mark their preferred terms as preferred. We could even list who had chosen that as the preferred term. If Thomas Vander Wal chooses folksonomy, then who are we to argue?
We can also naturally have debate too, linked to each term. Why was this term chosen? (This’ll be a scope note then!)
We could also specify whether a term was broader, narrower, or relative, building our terms into a folksaurus (I googled this, and Dan Brown’s Greenonions post was the only result!). At the moment it appears that folksonomies have one top level heading and nothing else, loosely grouping objects by a single or pre-coordinated descriptor.
This way we could provide both Authority and Consistency to a term.
Supplied as a web service, we could then easily incorporate this into our disambiguation pages in a wiki, or in our blog posting systems, providing asynchronous feedback to the user about which term the rest of the community preferred.
And… This could easily be multilingual, with related terms in different languages. How much of the blogosphere do I miss because my first language is English? I know of a Library 2.0 blog written in Norway, but I haven’t a clue what he’s talking about!
Not to mention eliminating typo errors…
Technorati Tags: library 2.0, indexing, resource discovery, folksonomies, folksaurus
August 1st, 2006 at 09:15
I wrote about Wikipedia’s system of categories – it’s a kind of collaborative created thesaurus, so you could call it folksaurus http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0604036. There are also links between different language Wikipedias.