[Sigia-l] tagging versus taxonomy

[Alexander Johannesen]

On 10/16/06, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Well, like everything else in life, neither tags nor taxonomies live
> in a contextual vacuum.

A tag is atomic, a taxonomy is not. A folksonomy or tagsonomy is made
from tags, while a taxonomy is made from taxa.

> The minute I tag something as, say, "#FF0000," do I not
> also implicitly tag it as a "color"?

You do, perhaps, but the computer doesn't know that.

> For a web designer, doesn't a single six-digit alpha-numeric tag
> (#FF0000) already come with its own inherent/implicit tag
> structure?

For a web designer that does CSS, sure, but there's a danger here that
we confuse semantics with structures a computer knows about. Even if
there *are* taxonomies or folksonomies that are implicit to us it
doesn't follow that the computer knows about it. The whole domain of
semantic data modelling is *all* about trying to get computers to
understand implicit semantics.

> IOW, tags usually stand in abstraction only in our minds, but
> immediately compounded by the context in any given usage
> environment, no?

Not sure what you mean here, sorry. Do you mean tags are only
contextual in a non-computer way?


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