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 Hearst (the one who founded the Flamenco prioject) has published an insightful piece Clustering versus Faceted Categories for Information

Excerpt:

There are many open research questions about how to generate useful groupings and how to design interfaces to support exploration using grouping. Currently two methods are quite popular: clustering and faceted categorization. Here, I describe both approaches and summarize their advantages and disadvantages based on the results of usability studies.

In the same category:

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Information Architecture. 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.