Subject headings 2.0
Annotate the web, then rewire it « Jon Udell
It’s the slicing and dicing and tagging, not the rewiring, that’s the real bottleneck. I talked last week about factoring group formation out of the various social networks into a common infrastructure. We need to do the same for tagging. How do I know whether to tag my contribution as HillaryClinton and NewHampshire and manufacturing or Hillary Clinton and NH and manufacturing? Where’s the immediate feedback that shows me, across tag-oriented services including YouTube and Blip, how my contribution does or doesn’t align with others, and how I might adjust my tag vocabulary to improve that alignment?
In which technologists re-invent and attempt to automate the authority file.
Technorati Tags: library2.0, tagging, folksonomy
Comments
The authority file itself needs re-invention - but not likely by it's longstanding exponents.
Many rating/classifying/tagging situations can benefit from the ability to express the degree of application of a "tag" term as well as to indicate the certainty of the tagger that the term applies.
For example,instead of making a tag/no-tag decision (which is what the current authority control regime enforces), one acutally possesses the more nuanced ability to indicate that (1.) a given tag is 60% applicable to everything the item of interest is about and (2.) the tagger is 90% sure that the tag applies to the item.
Techniques from psychophysics and (ack) marketing can then be brought to bear to relate the item's features to a given tag, while at the same time tease out the tagger's individual or group-related characteristics.
Posted by: RJ | February 14, 2007 10:47 AM