[TagCommons-WG] Use Cases for Sharing Tag Data

[Bernard Vatant]

Hi all

Taking the opportunity of Harry's remark on languages to introduce 
myself in the debate.
First to say a non-native english speaker involved in many projects 
dealing with multilingual resources (European Community, North Africa 
and Asia so far, more to come ...) of course shares the concern of Harry 
concerning multilingual tagging.

Actually seems to me that multilingualism is only an aspect of the issue 
of binding/clustering/hubbing tags one might consider to have more or 
less the same meaning. Forgive the loose vocabulary, I'm in fact not 
very familiar with the tag universe [1], I happen to be in this list, I 
guess, following exchanges with Tom at the time of his reference 
publication [2], on the issue of tag identity. How to link various 
representations of same/similar things/concept/subjects/referents is 
really my favourite horse. My blog "the wheel and the hub" from which 
the above post is extracted, is all about that stuff.

Some thinking outloud about it. Please tell if it's irrelevant to this 
forum, since I have hard time to figure what is the borderline between 
naming, categorization, whatever, and tagging. I don't want to raise any 
debate about this, I agree with Tom there has been too much of it at 
nauseum without clarification. So I will just push pragmatic questions, 
and please feel free to say : this is in scope, this is not.

I just discover in a previous post here the notion of "tag bundle". Does 
it make sense to use that techique to bind tags likely to be used for 
the same data, in the same or different languages
e.g., "Château de Versailles" "Palais de Versailles" "Versailles Palace" 
"Chateau of Versailles" "Palacio de Versalles" "Palácio de Versalles" 
"Castillo de Versailles" etc ...
IOW does a notion of "synonym tags" or "equivalent tags" make sense, and 
is it a particular case of bundling? I think sharing data needs 
something along those lines anyway.

The tags of the above list are used on Flickr, say, but are also used as 
resources title, such as Wikipedia articles. For example 
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chateau_of_Versailles" redirects to 
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Versailles". To me it's like 
saying that in en.Wikipedia context, "Chateau of Versailles" is 
equivalent to "Palace of Versailles". It tags the same resource.
(Note en passant that if Flickr does not support multilingualism, 
Wikipedia does)
Is not html <title> a kind of tagging avant la lettre, and does it makes 
sense to include it in our reflexion?

That's all for the moment

Cheers

Bernard

[1] 
http://universimmedia.blogspot.com/2006/12/classifying-is-hard-tagging-is-worse.html
[2] http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontology-of-folksonomy.htm


Harry Halpin a écrit :
> Also the "language" of the tag is also going to pop up in
> cross-appliation tag aggregation, and I think mapping to a common
> ontology could help us with this this problem. For example, what if I
> know both German and English (which I do), what if I want all resources
> about tags about Germany? Germans would tag that with "Deutschland".
>
> Furthermore, this would be a great use-case for seeing what taggers are
> doing in different language communities. Are the same tags used by
> people in Korea as in the USA?
>
> There's an interesting message on the microformat list-serv about
> multi-lingual tagging between Karl Dubost and Tantek Celik that's worth
> looking at [1].
>
> And how the lack of a non-English user-interface on Flickr leading to
> all sorts of problem...
>
> [1]
> http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-October/006035.html
>   
-- 

*Bernard Vatant
*Knowledge Engineering
----------------------------------------------------
*Mondeca**
*3, cité Nollez 75018 Paris France
Web:    www.mondeca.com <http://www.mondeca.com>
----------------------------------------------------
Tel:       +33 (0) 871 488 459
Mail:     bernard.vatant at mondeca.com <mailto:bernard.vatant at mondeca.com>
Blog:    Leçons de Choses <http://mondeca.wordpress.com/>