Paul Heymann and Hector Garcia-Molina (Department of Computer Science, Stanford University) have recently published the paper Collaborative Creation of Communal Hierarchical Taxonomies in Social Tagging Systems.

Paul is a PhD student doing research on how to recreate hierarchical taxonomies from flat tag data, moving from the idea that this kind of structure is already implicitly (on […]

A few months before the italian IA Summit I organized, I was wondering if folksonomies could be considered as a specific discipline under the large information architecture’s umbrella. Here in Italy, folksonomies were still a matter for geeks/bloggers not for information professionals.

I decided anyway to present a speech titled Social Distributed Classification Schemes, talking about […]

When I talk about a possible mixture of traditional and emergent classification schemes the feedback I often hear is that tagging is easy and should continue to be easy because users will never use a complex system.

Let me say that I completly agree with this idea.

But why has a rich classification scheme and information retrieval […]

The Flamenco project (from Berkley.edu) is a well-known powerful framework to allow users to move through large information spaces in a flexible and faceted manner. Search results are organized and browsable directly exposing their metadata in an iterative way: hierarchical faceted metadata provides orientation and the ability to refine, expand and modify the current query, […]

Lately I’m really focused on the evolution of tagging. To find the new way you have to know the old path.. so I’m frequently coming back to faceted classification and Ranganathan’s ideas.

To add a structure on tags, a few different approaches seem to be viable. Clustering is among the most famous now.

On this topic, Marti […]