[Sigia-l] Eliminating categories in favour of tagging

[Seth Earley]

This is a perfect example of "managing by magazine article".  Someone in
management reads an article (usually written by a journalist as opposed to a
practitioner) and then decides to pursue a project or change a process.
Tagging is not "the new best practice in metadata generation for blogs".
Uncontrolled vocabularies are a giant leap backward into the past. (Why
would tags be a 'poor man's uncontrolled vocabulary'?  An uncontrolled
vocabulary is an uncontrolled vocabulary.  It means that the person applying
metadata is deciding on terms on the fly and can choose whatever term they
think is appropriate.)  

I also need to say that tagging is nothing new. Whenever metadata is applied
to any content, that content is being tagged. That said, allowing anyone to
apply metadata in an uncontrolled fashion  is  good way to harvest terms for
a controlled vocabulary.  I think the process breaks down when trying to
search on terms.  Because terns can be applied without consistent
interpretation, results will have high levels of recall but poor precision.
You mention faceted classification, but I don't think faceted
classifications can be uncontrolled.  Terms in a faceted classification need
to be orthogonal, that is mutually exclusive, there can be no overlap.  (I
suppose one could argue that terms could repeat from facet to facet but be
in different contexts in each facet but I don't think this would be a good
idea.) 

So I would suggest one not throw out controlled classifications but augment
them with collaborative tagging and then review collaborative tags for
inclusion in controlled classifications. 

Seth

Seth Earley 
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-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Alexander Johannesen
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 9:09 PM
To: Dmitry Nekrasovski
Cc: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Eliminating categories in favour of tagging

On 3/10/06, Dmitry Nekrasovski <mail.dmitry at gmail.com> wrote:
> My employer is in the process of upgrading its internal blogging 
> platform. The new version announcement came out a couple of days ago, 
> and contained a statement to the effect of "since tagging is the new 
> best practice in metadata generation for blogs, the new version will 
> not have post categories, only tags".
>
> What does everyone think of this move from an IA standpoint? Please 
> don't get caught up on the "best practice" part... :)

Hmm, who was it that coined "tagging is poor-mans uncontrolled vocabulary"?
Maybe I just did, but it's a good quote. :)

Well, apart from being a best-practice thing, it's also a misguided one.
First of all, a category system is an attempt to unify categorisation, while
tagging does the opposite. A category system ensures that everything must
fits into those categories even when they probably shouldn't (a problem
we're trying to solve), while tagging creates one category for every plural
and spelingmisstake there is (a problem with the problem-solver). In
essense, tagging is an attempt at organic faceted organisation, and sure it
works for simple things but as soon as you *need* those tags to have
applicability within controlled systems, you need to have some form of
concesus on them.

Recent thinking (actually, if you move in library circles it ain't recent at
all, but hey ...) involves 40% pre-defined categories (2 to
3 levels, depending on how brave you are) and 60% tagged sub-categories,
with various degrees of flexibility within those percentages. It's based on
the thinking that if a tag is mismatched it at least has a few parents that
will be valuable and workable, so tagging within a simpler category system.
Another way to do this is to make tags a part of a dynamic controlled
vocabulary, but this requires some technical implementation thinking as well
as a purely knowledge management thinking.

Of course, blind tagging (non-classified) is a basic faulty faceted system
and works for hobbyists and with small datasets, so if your stuff doesn't
need that degree of absoluteness or is reasonably small and not too diverse
in scope, I don't see any problem with it.


Regards,

Alex
--
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
                                                         - Frank Herbert __
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