On 12/08/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Tagging is flawed - some people put 'wiki', some put 'wikis', some put 'wikipedia', etc etc. And yet somehow it doesn't seem to matter. this is puzzling. I haven't really seen a site do intentionally-collaborative tagging, where the users actively try to have the same understanding for the same tag. no wonder we have so many problems with categories. ;)
The problem is that you need a controlled vocabulary of some form - a way of saying "mark all images with cats as 'cats', not 'cat'", twelve thousand times - and we so do not have this; we have a classic folksonomy, people tagging with whatever they feel like.
[Okay, now I've shown I can remember the buzzwords they taught me at library school...]
It's possible to turn a folksonomy into a controlled vocabulary, in two ways:
a) Manual patrolling - change all uses to conform with a controlled vocabulary b) Tag equivalence - ensure everything *corresponds* to an entry in a controlled vocabulary
a) is essentially what gets done with categories. People keep looking at categories, merging them and renaming them and organising them; new data gets subsumed into the existing structure. (Enwiki's category intersections - "French mathematicians" - are great examples of this; there's two or three ways to phrase each one, and dozens of people doing nothing more than make sure they're all standardised). Here, you'd hunt out all incidences of "cats" and change them to "cat". The problem is the meta-standardisation of this... I'm not sure quite how long-term workable it is without constant maintenance.
b) is perhaps more interesting. In the bowels of whatever system you use for tagging, set it up so that one tag, one identifier, can be represented by many different tags. In effect, allow "cat" and "cats", but ensure a search for one displays the other as well. LibraryThing does this, and does it fairly well; their tag lists contain mispellings and foreign terms as well as variant names, which is quite useful. Configuring this and ensuring it doesn't get accidentally snarled up - inadvertently merging two large groups can be confusing - is tricky, but once it's up and running it should require less ongoing maintenance.
A few representative collections, representing one tag each:
philosophy of science, Ciencia-Filosofía, Philosophy (Science), philosophy_of_science, Science - Philosophy, science philosophy, Science-Philosophy
theology, teologia, theolgy, theologie, Theololgy, Theoloogy
wwii, 2nd world war, second world war, SecondWorldWar, second_world_war, segunda guerra, Segunda Guerra Mundial, w.w.ii, war (WWII), war world ii, word war 2, World War (1939-1945), world war 1939-1945, world war 2, world war ii, World War II 1939-1945, world war ll, world war two, world war. 1939-1945, World War2, world-war-2, worldwarII, world_war_ii, ww 2, ww ii, ww11, ww2, WW_II, Zweiter Weltkrieg
The main problem here is ambiguous terms, the classic that LT deals with being 'sf' - science fiction, or books about San Francisco? There are also long debates to be had about meaningful correspondences - are 'paranormal' and 'supernatural' the same thing? 'humor' and 'humour'? The last won't really apply for photos, but is an interesting question with regard to the written word - compare http://www.librarything.com/tag/humor and http://www.librarything.com/tag/humour - and demonstrates the subtleties that can be found in folksonomies...