PUBLIC MARKS from nhoizey with tags tags & folksonomies

Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by formal terms used in data that they might generate or consume. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the social web. They are created as people associate terms with content that they generate or consume. Recently the two ideas have been put into opposition, as if they were right and left poles of a political spectrum. This piece is an attempt to shed some cool light on the subject, and to preview some new work that applies the two ideas together to enable an Internet ecology for folksonomies.

Depuis que j’utilise des tags, sur des sites ou services de plus en plus nombreux, je ne m’étais jamais posé cette question, mais elle ne me semble pas anodine.

Folksonomies—like controlled vocabularies—are here to stay, and I would like to focus on how we can make them work better.

The folksonomy is most often also social so that others that use the same vocabulary will be able to find the object as well. It is important to note that folksonomies work best when the tags used to describe objects are in the common vocabulary and not what a person perceives others will call it (the tool works like no other for personal information management of information on the web, but is also shared with the world to help others find the information).

A must read scientific article.

"Flickr est ce site qui permet à chaque personne de poster des photographies et d'ajouter des étiquettes à chacune des images. L'étiquetage ne possède aucune hiérarchie, il est complètement plat et donc souvent complètement inutile dans le cadre d'une recherche plus complexe et plus organisée."

xFolk is an open xhtml microformat that allows users to publish their own folksonomy classifications for aggregation by the services they choose.

Readers raised several useful issues with the first iteration of the microformat. This new iteration addresses those issues. Further comment is appreciated.