Standartizing Tag Semantics
striatic has been leading for several months a brave attempt on the Flickr discussion board to standardize the usage of certain tags.
Several similar discussions went on in the del.icio.us discussion list. Suggestions for a wiki-like solution to organize such an effort keep coming up.
There are some things that tagging systems could do to reduce the effort associated with this, without losing the value of free-form, tag-with-whatever-comes-to-mind tagging.
Some of them can be done in the backend, when searching for tags (like stemming). However, there are probably more things that such systems can do to encourage users to choose the more standard tags.
For example, using the same logic used by the Flickr clustering algorithm, when a user tags an item with "SF", the system could - after letting me use the SF tag - make a suggestion:
The "SF" tag often stands for "San Francisco". The "SF" tag was used 36,717 times, while the "San Francisco" tag was used 214,347 times. Would you like to add the "San Francisco" tag as well?
As more and more users join the tagging circles, thought should be given to the scalability of the model - it is in everyone's best interest to reduce the number of tags in the tag space. Well. Except maybe for Oracle and MySQL :)
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