Since a few people asked me about that, here is the link to the ppt deck from the italian IA Summit.

I gave a talk about the evolution of the social tagging introducing my ideas about the future of folksonomies:

• Faceted Tagging (Mefeedia) Editors create mutually exclusive facets and users assign tags to facets
• Advanced Navigation Iterative search refinement using more than one tag at the same time (tag based navigation similar to modern facets based navigation)
• Hierarchical Tagging (SmartDesktop for an example but probably RawSugar better applies here) Serendipity and Browsing Improvement through father-child navigation
• Wiki Approach to Hierachies creation (sort of a Wikipedia for tags based on AJAX)

More on this topics on my previous post Folksonomies 2.0 - The Chaotic Chaos.

I’m no more sure about the wiki approach. My idea was letting users move tags around like you do modifying a Wikipedia article. The final effect could be a global taxonomy build by the contribution of users.

I’m now starting to replace this approach with a clustering algorithm: people build their sets of hierarchies, while the system aggregates those hierarchies to provide a global vision. If enough users put the tag B under the tag A (A>B), the global taxonomy will include this organization.

After that presentation, I continued rethinking on this topic, coming out with a few other ingredients that could be considered:

• User Rating - to provide a collaborative filtering on the value of tagged items following Dig’s example in a real Web 2.0 approach
• Hierarchical Tags Clustering - as said before, to extrapolate a forest of trees from the hierarchies created by each single user. This forest could be proposed in the home page as a powerful navigation tool on all the content introduced by users
• Syntax Control - The system should be able to avoid or limit a wild proliferation of similar tags (e.g tags, tag, folksonomies, folksonomy,etc) when they “clearly” express the same concept. Is that “clearly” not being easy to define. A lot of different cases should be considered (synonyms, homonymys, etc), but my idea is creating a sort of synonyms’ ring with the preferred term choosen as the most frequently used
• Tags Suggestion - a few systems (del.icio.us too) have already introduced an AJAX based tool to let users see in real time which tags has been introduced in the system to reinforce the long tail effect. RawSugar suggests the tag with its entire hierarchical structure.
• Tags API - It should be possibile to export users’ tags to other systems using an XML format and an easy to use API to stimulate mashups. The export format should be hierarchical and faceted as well. This could facilate the development of monitoring tools about the users’ tagging behaviour.

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