UKOLN is supported by:

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The tagging question thesaurus meets
folksonomy Emma Tonkin Interoperability Focus
UKOLN is supported by
www.bath.ac.uk
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About UKOLN

• Digital information management -
• Provide advice and services to communities inc.
• Library
• Information
• Education
• Cultural Heritage
• Jointly funded by the MLA and the JISC

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Social Tagging

• Brief introduction to social tagging
• A distributed classification system.
• created by individuals, typically resource users.
  
• This bit is arguable

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Social tagging

• Currently very popular
• Cheerful anarchy!
• Annotations containing whatever comes into the
  user's mind, given the interface and a resource
• Easy for the user to write, but computationally
  difficult to reuse

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Is Social Tagging Indexing?

• Describing a document by its subject content
• "An index is a structured sequenceresulting
  from a thorough and complete analysis of text--of
  synthesized access points to all the information
  contained in the text. The structured arrangement
  of the index enables users to locate information
  efficiently"
• Mulvany, Nancy C. (1994) Indexing Books. The
  University of Chicago Press. (Chicago)

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Is Social Tagging Metadata?

• What is metadata?
• It's been in the Guardian, so everybody knows
  what metadata is
• Document surrogates
• Why/What?
• Do you tag about the object you're tagging? Do
  tags represent the object?

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Is Social Tagging Taxonomy?

• Folksonomy -gt Folk taxonomy
• Vernacular naming system embedded in local
  cultural and social systems

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Talking about...

• What information do we need to know or share
  about this object?
• Lots of details are irrelevant
• Lots are potentially relevant
• Some are observations, some are interpretations
  or reactions
• What details do we choose?

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A spectrum of annotations
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Discussion

• Advantages and disadvantages of each type of
  metadata
• Interface considerations and opportunities
• Making the most of the metadata -
• - and the communities!...

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Conclusion

• Tags are about more than description
• Tagging is easy to do
• It doesn't look very much like formal
  classification because it isn't!
• The value of tagging depends on expectations and
  the context of use.
• Nielsen Speaking the user's language