Monday, December 29, 2008

Social Tagging

Many have examined the value of user tagging and compared it to the use of controlled vocabulary.

These are the topics in "The Value of Social Tagging in a Corporate Setting" (April 2006) by Stephanie Lemieux in the TaxoCop wiki. It includes a description of the use of social tagging at Raytheon where "people submit website suggestions (URLs) along with recommended tags/keyword which are subsequently verified and approved by librarians."
"Why does it work? Chiefly because the sites submitted are specific to a group or discipline, and no matter how hard we try, having a degree in library science does not give you a degree in engineering (insert discipline here). We do not speak their vernacular. We do well enough to add value with controlled terms, but these folk tags have a life of their own."

The 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
had two papers on social tagging available through the ACM Portal:


Abstract and references are available. Access requires subscription to ACM.

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