Where tagging meets the Semantic Web
The Web is changing. It’s moving toward a social web, a place where people can social and share knowledge. Central to this new Web is the idea of tagging — the ability to annotate Web resources with keywords. One question that many people ask is “what’s next?” Where will we go from here? What’s role for the Semantic Web in the social web and tagging?
Tagging works because it gives users the freedom to annotate resources without prior education in knowledge representation and modeling. However, it’s imperfect. Freely to add tags could cause the creation of tag clouds in chaos. Also, people’s choice of tags may change as new trends evolve — e.g., some people tag blogs with “blog” and some others tag with “blogs”; many people tag web pages with “web2.0″ and “ajax” without discriminating their actual meaning; people behave different when tagging other people’s photos as opposes to their own. It seems that in order for us to move forward with the social web, we need technology more than just tagging.
Tom Gruber discussed this subject in his keynote talk at ISWC 2006. Gruber believes that Semantic Web technology can help build to an “intelligent” social web. In particular, he argues that the technology can help to integrate user-contributed data (i.e., tags) across multiple applications. Also, it can help to create collective intelligence, i.e., aggregated knowledge extracted from a mix of structured and unstructured data.
Gruber pointed out few application features that can be brought about with a formalized ontology of tag data. These include using tags to search across multiple sites, exploiting collective filtering to help users to discover new knowledge, and improving the expressiveness of search queries (e.g., find all hotels in Spain tagged with “romantic”).
I’m very much agree with Tom Gruber’s thinking, especially on the use of Semantic Web technology to enable vocabulary alignment and knowledge aggregation. In today’s social web, social and psychological elements challenge the innovative minds of engineers and developers. I strongly believe that with Semantic Web technology, we can overcome these problems (if not all, at least part of them).
Resource: presentation videos from ISWC 2006
Wow. Great post. With the re-launch of adaptiveblue3.0 and some recent sleuthing I’ve been doing around the buzz and hype around (shhhhh) “web3.0“, I’m finding more and more folks like you (and also a LOT of librarians) who are starting to get serious about the importance and need for controlled vocabularies and guidelines in social tagging systems.
I read an article today where the author discussed the philosophy of folksonomy and the culture of tagging in the context of more traditional cataloging and classification systems. Pretty interesting stuff indeed. I think the topic of your post is right up the same alley. I posted a brief comment on my site earlier tonight on the topic of folksonomies, tagging, and the semantic web.
Personally, I struggle to manage my del.icio.us cloud because the interface for tag management is woefully lacking. Furthermore, I think social tagging systems need to do a better job of implicitly guiding users in the right direction from a knowledge organization and tag management perspective.
del.icio.us kind of does with with its tag recommendations, but it falls short by not (a) spell checking tags, (b) implicitly detecting/managing equivalency relationships, (e.g. TimBernersLee vs. Tim Berners Lee vs. Tim Berners-Lee), and (c) and allowing/supporting descriptive compound phrases (e.g. recommendation engine vs. recomendationengine or recomendation-engine or even recomendation.engine). Anyway, you get my point. Thanks again for an informative post!
–brian
BTW - I like your use of the terms “vocabulary alignment and knowledge aggregation” over more the more traditional “cataloging and classification”.
PS - as I went to enter some tags before I submitted this comment, I noticed that the tagging system on this blog supports comma separated tags, which del.icio.us does not. As I am an avid del.icio.us tagger, I am used to space separating tagging. Again, just another issue to consider. Maybe we need tagging standards? I wonder if the Semantic web activity has any room for such an effort.
Comment by bdeseattle — November 21, 2006 @ 1:54 am
Brian, thank you for your comment. I also use del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks, and I share your frustration. I wish it could provide spelling checks and could detect semantic equivalence.
I believe it’s only a matter of time for sites like del.icio.us and flickr to pick up these features and push forward the Semantic Web idea from a tagging perspective. The future looks exciting.
Comment by harrychen — November 21, 2006 @ 8:05 am