Tagging

From our little ISKO UK research observatory...

Colleagues following research in social tagging (collaborative tagging), folksonomies) may be interested in the series of articles by Margaret Kipp deposited in the dLIST archive:

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2007) @toread and Cool: Tagging for Time, Task and Emotion. In Proceedings 8th Information Architecture Summit, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2007) Tagging for Health Information Organisation and Retrieval.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2007) Tagging Practices on Research Oriented Social Bookmarking Sites. In Proceedings Canadian Association for Information Science, Montreal, Quebec.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2006) Complementary or Discrete Contexts in Online Indexing: A Comparison of User, Creator and Intermediary Keywords. In Proceedings Canadian Association for Information Science, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2006) Exploring the Context of User, Creator and Intermediary Tagging.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. (2006) Patterns in Tagging: An Analysis of Collaborative Classification Practices in Social Bookmarking Tools.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. and Campbell, D. Grant (2006) Patterns and Inconsistencies in Collaborative Tagging Systems: An Examination of Tagging Practices. In Proceedings American Society for Information Science and Technology, Austin, Texas.

Folksologies: de-idealizing ontologies

I just stumbled across an interesting item in a blog which looks at the folksonomy/taxonomy debate from a somewhat different angle. It references Clay Shirky's grumpy indictment of formal taxonomy Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, and contains a passing mention of librarians 'puking' on emergent ontologies. However, read on, because it goes on to propose a way of disambiguating the homonyms which are bound to creep into social tagging practices (using URIs) and suggests that this will keep both the 'Lakoff-ians' (his term) and the librarians happy.

Folksologies: de-idealizing ontologies

The Business of Knowing

Just wanted to draw your attention to Helen Nicol's relatively new blog The Business of Knowing.

Helen works for Connecting for Health and is just completing an MEd that examined the use of shared blogging among programme managers in the NHS. She's got a wealth of references on how people learn and share - how they go about "the business of knowing" - that may be of interest to those of us involved in organising knowledge.

In particular, there's a great live strand on Enterprise 2.0: same problem, different platforms that includes some useful stuff on tagging and how this is "A skill in itself if tags are to be meaningful for all."

A tag too far?

For those ISKO UK members who don't subscribe to the BCS KIDMM mailing list, I would recommend that you watch a video of David Weinberger (co-author of 'The Cluetrain Manifesto'; author of 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined'; and now of 'Everything is Miscellaneous') In summary, Weinberger is one of the most respected commentators on the new paradigms brought to us by the Web. This interesting videocast is brought to ISKO UK courtesy of Conrad Taylor of KIDMM, who in turn received the link from Dave Crossland.

Why should you watch? Because Weinberger discusses Web 2.0, the transition occurring from the Web as a centralised publish-subscribe model to a fully networked model, taxonomies, folksonomies and faceted navigation. Be warned! Some of Weinberger's views may appear, to dyed-in-the-wool KO classicists, at least challenging, at most heretical!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2159021324062223592&q=type%3Agoogle+engEDU

Enjoy it.

clipped from www.everythingismiscellaneous.com Peter Morville: [The opening:] “…David Weinberger’s mesmerizing new book about organization, authority, and knowledge. I received my advance copy last week and read it in a single day. I found it interesting and inspiring, and I recommend it highly. But, I don’t agree that everything is or will be or should be miscellaneous, and I don’t believe David is entirely fair to librarians, information architects, and other professional organizers.”

Ontology Summit 2007

Ontology Summit 2007 - Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy: Understanding the Distinctions. This event doesn't seem to be listed on the Links page on the ISKO UK web site. The survey contained on this page is now closed, but a glance through the introductory text tells me that the Knowledge Engineering community is looking to expand its horizons and maybe talk to others involved in related fields. An aim, it seems, not dissimilar to our own.

I for one, look forward to seeing the results of this survey, if indeed it is published outside the conference itself. Do any ISKO UK members have connections with this community?

Bob

Teleconference roundtable "Bridging the gap between folksonomies and taxonomies"

Link courtesy of Jan Wyllie:

A roundtable on 17 May 11:00 am - 2:00 pm (Eastern), 8:00 am - 11:00 am (Pacific) via teleconference
Bridging the gap between folksonomies and taxonomies"


"Is it possible to combine the creativity of "social tagging" with the rigor of professional document indexing? In this teleconference roundtable, Bradley Allen will do a joint presentation with Rafael Sidi of Elsevier Engineering Information about a system that lets metadata managers associate author-generated keywords with terms in a controlled vocabulary and lets users use the results for search."