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Week 7 Bookmark 1: Tagging – The mechanism of social knowledge management
I want to shed some light on a very ubiquitous feature of social software and the kinds of impact it has to our social behaviour – Tagging. Tagging is also called Folksonomy. Aside from the obvious advantage of tagging that is to annotate information with specific keywords for ease of searching and sharing. Tagging also deeply changed how knowledge is shared among individuals within an organization as way to classify information. There are issues with tagging such as inconsistence choice of words, polysemy (Too general, too vague) and synonymy (Too many different words that means the same thing) and lack of hierarchy. But nonetheless an efficient way to look up information that are of interest by linking them via keywords. Couple that with a tag cloud which also presented an overall trend of topic with higher attention within a community.
This paper (http://0-ieeexplore.ieee.org.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4755406) explains in detail what social tagging entails within the context of knowledge management among knowledge workers.
Dickson
COMP 650: Social Computing
Comments
I wish it were quite as wonderful an idea. Folksonomies have some issues - accuracy, context-sensitivity, synonymy, homonymy and ambiguity raise many awkward problems which have interested me for many years now: I built my first folksonomic system in 1998, my first tag cloud in 1999, and I continue to do so. I have a few ideas about how to improve things - e.g. see http://editlib.org/p/30195 (should be accessible via the AU online library).
Important to note that 'tagging;' is not a synonym for 'folksonomy'. A folksonomy is typically built using tags, but the tagging behaviour is what enables us to build that folksonomy, not the thing itself. A folksonomy is any bottom-up taxonomy based on the crowd's classifications of things, rather than using an expert's or group of experts' schema.