[TagCommons-WG] Use Cases for Sharing Tag Data

[Tom Gruber]

I've been part of a lot of conversations about ontologies and folksonomies,
and frankly, many have been a waste of time.  On the other hand, I've seen
incredible progress made when a group of people get together to agree on
what their data has in common and how they might connect the dots: in
medicine, engineering, cultural artifacts, and even libraries.  The one
significant difference between the two cases is whether or not the parties
identified the *purpose* of sharing data.  And in almost every case, the
purpose was best described as it often is in software engineering -- as use
cases.

 

So I propose we do that here. 

 

At an abstract level, creating a way to share tag data across applications
can enable software to compare, aggregate, join, or otherwise connect tag
assertions from one source with those from another.  This can be useful
whenever the tag data are, in fact, connected meaningfully, and when the
combined data set has more value than the simple sum of the parts.  So let's
describe use cases in which these two properties hold, and try to drill on
what kinds of semantics would need to be identified to support each use
case.

 

In the Ontology
<http://tomgruber.org/writing/mtsr05-ontology-of-folksonomy.htm>  of
Folksonomy paper, I laid out two use cases:

*	Collaborative Tagging Across Multiple Applications
*	Collaborative Filtering Based on Tagging


In retrospect, I think "Collaborative tagging" was not a good choice of
words.  There are really two use cases in there.  One is Cross Application
Tagging by a single user (using tags as personal bookmarks), and the other
is combining the aggregate tag data of multiple users across application
(let's call that Cross Application Tag Aggregation).  

 

Thomas Vander Wal has an application that does Cross Application Tagging.
Thomas, would you mind telling us about that?

 

Cross Application Tag Aggregation is useful when you want to build on other
people's tags.  Richard Newman has built a system that does this sort of
thing - Richard?

 

Harry Halpin is doing excellent work bridging ontologies to more syntactic
formats with the intent to enable use cases such as cross application
tagging.  We should hear more about this in a separate thread.  For here, I
would point out that to do this right, you need to join both the tags and
the identity information (about the tagger) across applications,
communities, or whatever you call it.  

 

Mika Illouz turned me on to the idea of Collaborative Filtering using tags
from multiple sources.  Mika built a system that one could attach to any web
site to add tagging, so that such a collaborative filtering engine could be
built on data from many heterogeneous sources.   Mika, can you describe what
is happening with this line of work these days, by you or others?  Dave
Beckett, I believe Yahoo talks about Social Search in this sense - can you
comment?

 

Others who know about projects to do cross-application tagging, please
describe them in a response to this thread.

 

Thanks

tom

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.tagcommons.org/pipermail/wg-tagcommons.org/attachments/20070216/d10f7fcf/attachment-0003.htm>