Revision [7182]
This is an old revision of WikkaFolksonomy made by DarTar on 2005-04-11 08:42:42.
Wikka Tags
More on tagging: Wikipedia:Folksonomy
What is tagging
I'd like to share with you some thoughts on the possibility of integrating a tagging system into WikkaWiki.Tags are a simple way of labelling URLs and building a basic category system.
Tagging (aka Folksonomy or Social bookmarking) is becoming one of the most pervasive practices in the field of SocialSoftware social software. Tags allow users to categorize content: categories emerge from single users' labelling of URLs. Tags offer also a smart (distributed) ranking system: URLs that receive more times the same tag are likely to emerge as the most relevant and authoritative sources for the topic associated to the tag (an idea similar to the PR strategy adopted by Google). Web services building categories out of users' tags include del.icio.us (the first service which introduced tagging), Technorati, Simpy, Jots.
An example of tagging
Look at this example of technorati's page for the tag: wiki or just choose one of these tags.
Why tagging
The interest of tags is twofold.
- On the one hand, tags can be used internally as an alternative to categories: they help organize content by topic in a simple and intuitive way.
- On the other hand, tags can be used to post labelled content to external sites.
The second aspect deserves some attention. It is quite common for bloggers to tag their posts, so that web services like technorati can categorize them by topic. It might be interesting to add such a feature to wikis as well.
How to publish tags
Publishing tags requires just a simple modification of the RSS generation script, to add the following lines: <category>[tagname]</category>
<dc:subject>[tagname]</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>[tagname]</dc:subject>
Another way to tag pages consists in adding a rel="tag" attribute to a link. For instance:
<a href="http://apple.com/ipod" rel="tag">iPod</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity" rel="tag">Gravity</a>
<a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua" rel="tag">Chihuahua</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity" rel="tag">Gravity</a>
<a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua" rel="tag">Chihuahua</a>
Once links or RSS contain tag information, you can easily publish them by pinging (automatically or manually) web services like technorati. The tagged URL will then show up in the corresponding tag page.
- These examples seem to come from a Technorati page; this page specifically explains how to publish "tags" to Technorati. It also explains that Technorati is a service for blogs really, and where it gets its content from (publishing "tags" about your own content is just one way). More importantly, the RSS example is specifically for RSS/ATOM (one of the several RSS standards) - you cannot just add such tags to any RSS file: if the RSS standard you're using doesn't support the <category> and/or <dc:subject> tags you'll end up with an invalid RSS feed that will just not load any longer in many feed readers. I'm not sure what pinging other services than Technorati would do - are there others that actually support these (RSS/ATOM) tags or the rel="tag" attibute in links? --JavaWoman
Integrating tags in a wiki
Forthcoming...
- I'm still puzzled about the purpose of this. What do you gain that you don't already have by having a search engine indexing your wiki?
BTW, of the examples of "tagging" services mentioned above, Technorati seems to be the only one that actually supports categorizing your own content; the others are more "collaborative" efforts (people categorizing others' content) - although it's nor even reallly collaboration but rather a compilation of personal categorizations of bookmarks. I'm very doubtful about the value of these efforts though, especially since there are no agreed-upon vocabularies. There are already established standards for adding meta data to content though, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Dublin Core (RDF also supports describing your own as well as other's content). The W3C's effort for the www.w3.org/2001/sw/ Semantic Web Activity is based on such standards, as are various related activities. --JavaWoman
- Digging a little further I stumbled over this page which nicely describes my misgivings about the totally informal assigning of keywords on "tagging" services and merging "tagging" from different people made for different purposes. What amazes me is that this is a (blog) post from just a month ago and the comments read as if the discovery of these kinds of problems is something new. In fact this is very old news - it seems the people discussing "folksonomy" (or "fauxonomy" which I consider more descriptive :)) have never even heard of RDF or ontologies or all the work that's already been done in this area for years, and are discovering it all over again. Sigh.
Actually, maybe that's the problem. Maybe the metadata/RDF/ontology community hasn't been doing enough 'outreach' promotion of their work and ideas. I really 'discovered' RDF a little over 4 years ago (though I was aware of it before) but I didn't need any outreach for that: I just happened to be right on the spot at a conference where yet another application of RDF was being discussed and I was interested in the application. There are actually many applications of RDF already (and of DC, which also can be used as a part of RDF); one example is the RSS 1.0 standard. It's all about meta data - and long before there was DC, or RDF, or even the web there was meta data and there were ontologies and methods for creating them. It makes me a little sad to see a whole web community seems to be in the process of discovering it all over again, without taking advantage of all the work that's been done before. A lot sad, actually. --JavaWoman
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