[TagCommons-WG] Use Cases for Sharing Tag Data

[Richard Newman]

> 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?
Quite so.

I actually wasn't considering specific systems or activities when I  
tried to formalize my tag ontology[1]. Instead, I tried to precisely  
model the act of a user's tagging of a resource. It turns out that  
this kernel is present in every tagging application I've seen, which  
is convenient! More recently I've applied this ontology to my own  
software, where it uses tags, and also to integrate my own taggings  
from del.icio.us, de.lirio.us/Simpy, etc.  The details change between  
services, but there are a great deal of similarities.

This integration between services turns out to be one of your use  
cases: getting data from different tagging services and smushing it  
together. Once you get them into a shared data model, with shared  
identifiers — RDF provides these — you can start finding books  
(Librarything), pictures (Flickr), websites (del.icio.us), and people  
(my own stuff) which are associated with the tags you want. Pulling  
in other users' tags introduces some semantic issues, but again lets  
you do more.

> 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.
Quite so. Stefano Mazzocchi and I ran into this, and I tend to  
'solve' it by using unique URIs for each user's tags. Tough problem;  
I'd love to hear more about it.


Thanks for starting this WG, Tom; it should be interesting.

-R

[1] <http://www.holygoat.co.uk/projects/tags/>

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