Does Tagging Work?

User tagging is much talked about on the Internet, and is extensively used for social bookmarking (del.icio.us, magnolia, rawsugar), blog posts (Technorati), community news sites (Digg.com, Newsvine), photo sharing sites (Flickr) and video sharing (YouTube). Subject directories such as Yahoo and Open Directory Project with their subject classification structures are considered very old Web 1.0 and nearly obsolete.

This presentation (Sept 2006) by Thomas Vander Wal (InfoCloudSolutions) on Understanding Folksonomy: Tagging that Works is a very good overview of what tags are and why some people love them.

In tagging, he explains, "People are not so much categorizing, as providing a means to connect items (placing hooks) and provide their meaning in their own understanding."

There are good examples from the main social bookmarking sites on how to use the tags to dig into a topic.

Online Taxonomy Seminar from Stellent

Stellent is hosting an online seminar on August 23, 2006 on "Practical Strategies for Taxonomy and Metadata Design" as part of its ECM Expert Series. Zach Wahl from Project Performance Corporation is the speaker. His expertise is in "the development of business taxonomies and ontologies and [he] has deployed Enterprise Information Portals for a variety of organizations."

Finding through tags

Findability with tags: Facets, clusters, and pivot browsing by Rashmi Sinha (July 27) - Sinha considers three types of browsing: facets such as at wine.com; clustering and recommendations; and "pivot browsing" -- "When everything (tag, username, number of people who have bookmarked an item) is a link, you can use any of those links to look around you. You can change direction at any moment. Its a lightweight browsing mechanism, less structured and more freeform than browsing traditional hierarchies or even browsing faceted systems."

Librarians talk about folksonomies

The Library 2.0 Folksonomy Gang in Talking with Talis (July 27) - a group of librarians talked with Paul Miller at Talis in the UK about folksonomies and user generated tagging and contrasted these to the Dewey and Library of Congress Subject Headings. The main question - is there a place for both? Karen Schneider of LII.org especially endorsed the use of a user-created folksonomy at LII. Others commented on the benefits of capturing new terminology through user tagging. To the question of problems in variety of terms and spellings, one presented the solution of pulling suggestions from a controlled vocabulary. There are many points to consider thanks to this podcast of their telephone conference.

LII.org Will Adopt Faceted Navigation

Librarians' Internet Index (lii.org) announced at the ALA conference that it would be adopting faceted classification to assist in navigating its collection of quality web sites. The technology is provided by Siderean Software.

""One of the key reasons for selecting Siderean's Seamark Navigator was its front-end navigation features," said Karen G. Schneider, director of LII. "By replacing our existing, cumbersome search capabilities with faceted navigation, our growing community of users will be able to quickly and easily browse our vast collection of peer-reviewed content. With more than 10 million hits per month and a repository of 18,000 items categorized in 14 main topics, 300 primary topics, and 5,000 subtopics, we needed a way for people to rapidly browse these collections to improve discovery. We also needed a way to highlight collections and feature new and custom collections. Faceted navigation allows us to illuminate these items. Users also will be able to avoid standard search 'dumps' or result lists, which lead to dead-ends. Instead, Siderean will present results in logical categories to enable users to navigate selections through LII's rich metadata. This is a tremendous benefit to our users.""

Librarians' Internet Index Selects Siderean Software to Improve Access to High Quality Web Content, Business Wire via MarketWatch (Jun 26)

Categorizer from Inxight

Categorize completely, KMWorld (June 28)

"Inxight Software has announced Categorizer 5.0, a new, hybrid categorization engine with automated techniques and editorial controls to ensure accuracy. Version 5.0 can also deploy third-party and industry-standard taxonomies and includes a "workbench" feature designed to facilitate the creation of testing of taxonomies."

Semantic Web Part 2

The idea of having a grand taxonomy (or several smaller ones) as the backbone for a semantic web seems to still have a glimmer of life to it judging from this report from the W3C (World Wide Web) conference taking place in Scotland.

Researchers look to semantic Web to drive Internet "Computer scientists discuss ideas for organizing the Internet's growing mass of data" By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service (May 24)

"Much of the discussion is centered on the "semantic Web," the term for how researchers believe information on the Web can be intelligently labeled, interpreted, and linked through applications that can draw relationships and discover buried information."

Adding keywords to a metatag for description won't do it. "Labeling information on the Internet involves tagging it with code and then classifying it into a taxonomy. Customized taxonomies and ontologies, or data models, could be created for different subject matters to connect disparate, rich information tucked away on servers."

"In the long term, businesses need to realize that developing ontologies for data is an asset, said Richard Benjamins, director of innovation and research and development at Intelligent Software Components in Madrid."

But who will develop and use these on the public Web?

Google Clusters with Inxight

Google is teaming up with Inxight to add clustering and entity extraction to search results from its Enterprise Search Engine.


Inxight Search Extender for Google Brings Sophisticated Clustering and Entity Extraction to a Familiar Enterprise Interface by John Blossom, Shore Communications (May 23, 2006)

"... using the interfaces provided into the Google Search Appliance and Google Desktop Inxight Software has announced the integration of its content extraction and content clustering capabilities to content retrieved by Google's enterprise search technology. As demonstrated at the Enterprise Search Summit conference today in New York City, the Inxight Search Extender clusters search results into dynamically generated categories, providing both topic-oriented views and extracted content in categories such as "People, Places, Date/Time, Product, Currency" and so on. Right-clicking on the results can allow one to hook into content from subscription services such as LexisNexis or Hoover's or to online services such as Google Earth."

Taxonomy for the Intranet

Cathy McKnight, a business consultant at Prescient Digital Media, has some advice for people building the web interface for the corporate intranet -- Don’t forget to add the Tax(onomy). People know that the web site should be attractive but might not realize that part of good design is to make the information findable.

"In this world of ultra-usability and user-centric websites, many great intranet sites go unused because of poor, or altogether lacking, site taxonomy.

So what is taxonomy? How does it differ from information architecture? And how do you create an effective taxonomy for a successful intranet?"

Conferences 2006

Information Today has announced two important conferences for people working with taxonomies and enterprise search.

Taxonomy Boot Camp Returns This Fall -- "Taxonomy Boot Camp is an intensive 2-day conference for taxonomists, info pros, and anyone in charge of categorizing, organizing, or managing content. The event will be at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose from November 2 to 3, 2006. "

Go "Beyond the Basics" with Enterprise Search Summit -- "Enterprise Search Summit, the 2-day intensive conference designed for information managers, IT and search professionals, is in New York City from May 23 to 24, 2006." Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, will be the keynote speaker.