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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>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.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>So I propose we do that here. </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>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.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>In the <a
href="http://tomgruber.org/writing/mtsr05-ontology-of-folksonomy.htm">Ontology
of Folksonomy</a> paper, I laid out two use cases:</span></font></p>
<ul style='margin-top:0in' type=disc>
<li class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Collaborative Tagging Across Multiple Applications</span></font></li>
<li class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Collaborative Filtering Based on Tagging</span></font></li>
</ul>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><br>
In retrospect, I think "Collaborative tagging" was not a good choice
of words. There are really two use cases in there. One is <b><span
style='font-weight:bold'>Cross Application Tagging</span></b> 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 <b><span
style='font-weight:bold'>Cross Application Tag Aggregation</span></b>). </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Thomas Vander Wal has an application that does Cross
Application Tagging. Thomas, would you mind telling us about that?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial;font-weight:bold'>Cross Application Tag Aggregation</span></font></b><font
face=Arial><span style='font-family:Arial'> 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?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>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. </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>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?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Others who know about projects to do cross-application
tagging, please describe them in a response to this thread.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Thanks</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><font size=2 face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>tom</span></font></p>
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