[Sigia-l] tagging versus taxonomy

[Paola Kathuria]

Jonathan Baker-Bates wrote:
> if I tag something as "cat," do I mean the animal, the
> lens type, the instrument of punishment or the contraction of the name
> "Catherine?"

Indeed. When Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz showed off Flickr's tagging
at Content 2.0, he gave the example of photos tagged with 'London'
and I was tempted to yell out "Which one? London England or London
Ontario?" Ahem.

I recently faced this issue when I added a shop to my new web site.
I already tagged my jewellery items for Froogle but I realised
that a "turquoise" tag is misleading because I use it to mean the
gemstone as well as just the colour.

I refined them to Gemstone/turquoise and Colour/blue/turquoise
(where a search on Colour/blue will find Colour/blue/turquoise,
Colour/blue/aqua).

I was pleasantly surprised to see in my visit report that
people seem happy to click on the tag links to filter the
catalogue. The search form isn't used much but I suspect that
either due to labelling or people are content to search on
single terms.


Paola
--
www.paolability.com