Ultimamente sto leggendo una marea di articoli sul sistema delle tag. C’è un grande interesse da parte della comunità sull’argomento. Il sistema di classificazione dei contenuti presenti sulla rete attraverso le parole chiave sembra esse…

Do you think users would be the ones who compose the hierarchy, or would a computer be better at generating this? Or experts? And can you explain your idea of “user ould iteratively move tags from a part of the hierarchy to other parts”? That sounds to me like a recipe for disaster. The alternative, copying tags, sounds better, although some kind of “see also” system of references would be required.

I haven’t looked at the basic facets that Peter van Dijck uses, but “Topic” to me sounds like the most general facet ever…

In closing, I like the general idea, but it needs some more thinking, and maybe some examples? If you’re really into the “2.0″ spirit, a quick beta would be the best thing

As I said in the post, the tag structure (and its variations) should emerge with the users’ action. Forget experts. Probagly the system could support this process too. In my opinion this is not a recipe for disaster but instead the opportunity to let an organism-like organization to naturally emerge.

For the facet point: Topic is only one of the facets (the one associate to the Matter category in Ranganathan). Other facets applies here (the instances of the Ranganathan’s categories time, space, personality, energy, etc).

As for the quick beta.. Well it wouldn’t be so quick, at least for me to code it! I will try to convince Peter Van Dijck to experiment these approach..

See you on Friday!

I love the idea of giving tags dimensionality and depth. Emanual Quintarelli writes about faceted tags and Folksonomies 2.0. Somebody stop me before I fall down the rabbit hole. I just started tracking some links, starting in Emanual’s blog entry…

And if the hierachy is from the users, maybe it becomes too complex. Namly everyone have is own hierachy. In your example “Rome”-”Italy”-”Europe”, maybe you want to add the province. I, a Dutchman, don’t know the province, so I do’nt want that in the hierachy.

I will add a few details to this post from the talk I gave to the first Italian IA Summit later today. Anyway:

1. The hierarchy doesn’t need to be shared between all the users (you could have a personal hierarchy as it is now with common tagging)

2. I could add a province, but you are not obliged to use it: Rome will always be under Italy. So If your level of granularity (related to what you know on the matter) is lower, no problem! You will continue to use the part of hierarchy that is interesting and useful for you.

1 - Improve the findability (hierarchies add context and help clearing the tags’ meaning)

2 - Improve the serendipity and the navigability (after you have checked all the content described through the tag “Rome”, you see that Rome is under Italy and you can start to review also the content tagged with Italy and so on..)

About the usability concern: here the UI design is fundamental. We have to study this problem deeper, trying to come out with a good solution..

What do you think?

It is interesting to see that people feel in need for some merging bewteen
traditional (hierarchies, facets) and new (folksonomies) tools. Maybe there should be some software managing the links between tags and a structured scheme. The usual way of doing this is allowing people to search for a subject through a box, and bring them to the point in scheme where it occurs, so that they can navigate starting from them. But this is no more a folksonomy, it’s a thesaurus/taxonomy

The problem with not having a central authority is how to keep the structure consistent enough to be useful, e.g. using the province level or not.

Also: are people willing to care about specifying facets and hierarchies, not only quick tags?

(I agree with Peter B that Topics means everyting apart from the extra-subject facets (like Language or Target), and should not be an equivalent of Matter, rather it should include PMEST.)