This is a period of great news for me. Among these changes, I’m happy to announce a new exciting research project on which I’m working together with Luca Rosati and Andrea Resmini.

Starting from my thoughts on tagging ecologies and on the evolution of collaborative tagging towards a more semantical and richer direction, we have started a project called FaceTag and it has been accepted to be presented as a case study at the Euro IA later this year in Berlin.

To quote directly from the dedicated page:

What: FaceTag is a working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking information architecture resources. It aims to show how the flat keywords space of tags can be effectively mixed with a richer faceted classification scheme to improve the system information architecture.

Why: Facets constitute an adaptive classification system capable to represent both a knowledge in movement (like that of collaborative environments) and several mental models at the same time. The blend of tags and facets is able to empower the information scent and berrypicking capability of the system.

Moving from the limits of today folksonomies and tag clouds, the system will incorporate some of the last trends in social tagging and web 2.0 applications with a special focus on the global user experience of the tool.

Our approach won’t be centred on powerful and advanced algorithms for the aggregration and clustering of information. A lot of knowledged people are already doing that (see for example RawSugar and Stanford)

Our approach will be based mainly on people and on the implicit/explicit observation and aggregation of their behaviour with the system.

Some of our research questions are:

• To which extent users can/want to add structure to flat tag spaces? Which kind of structure is the more appropriate tradeoff?
• How much can this structure enable better and more semantical navigation scenarios (are tag clouds over?)
• Which is the importance of a great user experience to stimulate people to contribute?
• Which is the better way to bootstrap a semantical collaborative tagging system?
• Are advanced aggregation algorithms between the main aspects to be considered in a new collaborative tagging system?

We have to cover a lot of ground yet, bu I’m sure this experience will let us gain a lot of insights about consumer and enterprise collaborative tagging applications.

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Information Architecture, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.