Tagging and folksonomy

The heart of Web 3.0 is semantics.  Semantics focuses on what one means to say, not just what one actually says.  Semantics is the difference between salient search results and an unfocused aggregation of … stuff.  Algorithms used by search engines are an effort to discern the meaning and rank relevance against users short, ambiguous, approximation of intent expressed in their search queries.  Web 3.0 semantics represents a significant advance over current search technologies because it attempts to look at meaning inherent in the content itself. 

To understand how this works and the role taxonomy plays in this search for meaning a little review maybe helpful.  Taxonomy categorizes information into a unified structure and controls the language to describe those categories.  Under this definition, the contributions of taxonomy are labeling, designing content, providing navigation patterns, and managing the relationship among content units.  These roles for taxonomy are essential to successful site development, especially as sites are increasingly dynamic, drawing content directly out of content management systems, and increasingly socialized to the point that systems rooted in databases are no longer able to scale to meet the storage demands.

Taxonomy is an integral part of a content producer's tools kit for adding metadata to their site.  Metadata presents an interpretive model for understanding content data, or the types of data actually evaluated by search engine algorithms.

I don't usually rave about specific technologies but Xobni is one of those tools that I can no longer work without.  When I teach courses on information access, I tell my students to build functionality that solves critical problems and that becomes a “must have” tool.  Build the things that users will scream about (or at least complain loudly) if you take them away. 

Xobni fits that requirement.  I had to remove Xobni once due to a problem with Outlook and kept missing its ability to find contact information, the contents of email messages, conversations that I had with prospects and colleagues, and, my favorite, the ability to locate messages when you don’t know the format of a person’s email address.

Last week, Seth Earley blogged about the inefficacy of social tagging, but there's one scenario in which social tagging will breathe new life into an esoteric, 200-year industry: book indexing.

I've written hundreds of book indexes, presided over the American Society for Indexing, managed an international indexing partnership, taught courses, established standards, built tools, and consulted with a lot of influential folks, so trust me when I tell you that it pains me to see this happening. I believe with every fiber of my professional being that the human work of subject indexing is and will continue to be superior in quality to every alternative ever imagined. Oh well.

There is just too much information to index by hand, period. Books, periodicals, websites, blogs, messages, and documents are being produced or transformed too quickly for humans to keep pace, regardless of training and tools. Perhaps in response, the use of search algorithms becomes ever more popular, while overly optimistic expectations of retrieval quality grows increasingly preposterous. A more realistic response would be an increase in subject indexers' fees -- after all, demand is outpacing supply at an astounding rate -- but indexers haven't experienced a rate increase since the 1990s. The truth is that editorial indexing and all smart hands-on tagging is disappearing in favor of automatic approximations. And it is a reasonable argument that the substandard tagging of millions of pages and documents is better than leaving most of them without any subject metadata whatsoever.

Are organizations relying more on so-called ‘social tagging’ and full text indexed based searches and forgoing controlled vocabularies?   I don’t think so.  There is a place for social tagging and I talked about this a while back in my post on Folksonomy vs. Taxonomy.

Although social tagging is less costly, and it can be useful, it would be completely inappropriate when trying to organize high value content.  For instance, content used for customer support, marketing processes, asset reuse, or processes with a compliance component.

This post is the second in a ten-part series on Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

The semantic enrichment of content through the application of metadata tagging is a critical activity in the creation of a well managed and usable information environment. There are a number of reasons why tagging is so important to enterprise information, including the enhancement of navigation (filtering/sorting mechanisms, guided navigation), improvement of search (relevancy, faceted search and best bets) and personalization (suggestions for related content, job role, location or department).

Tagging in SharePoint 2010 is approached from two perspectives, with the first originating from controlled vocabularies via Metadata Terms. Controlled terms are managed in a Term Set and surfaced as part of a document’s properties using the Managed Metadata column. The field itself is directly bound to a Term Set (or subset thereof), and enables users to easily browse available Terms for tagging. Important functionality appearing as part of the user interface includes:

After braving the high winds, rain and herring here today in Aarhus, Denmark, I had the pleasure of sitting in on the J.Boye keynote session by BJ Fogg of the Stanford University Persuasive Technology Lab.

BJ's topic was how social media uses (and we can leverage) persuasion techniques to influence behaviour. As an intermittently avid and lapsed Facebook and Twitter user, most of this talk felt like a session "on the couch" trying to deconstruct why we do what we do...

Triggers, Motivation & Ability

BJ started his talk with the notion of hot vs cold triggers. Hot triggers give users an immediate and obvious call to action (e.g. a sandwich board inviting you to come inside a store to have a coffee for 1$). Cold triggers are calls to action that can't be immediately acted upon (e.g. an advertisement for a movie or play - you have to call or go to a location to buy tickets).

Social media often uses hot triggers, sending you notifications to see people's feeds, see who has friended you, etc. But as BJ explains, triggers are not enough to create behaviours. You also need motivation.

Motivations for behaviour include:

• Pleasure / Pain
• Hope / Fear
• Social Rejection / Acceptance

So, I might decide to get involved in Facebook because I enjoy seeing what my friends from high school look like 15 years later (which counts for both pleasure and pain in many cases), or because I fear being seen as a old fuddy-duddy who doesn't keep up with the times, or because I want to relive the awful dance of social acceptance and rejection from high-scool.... ugh.

Looking for a good way to spend a week in the California sun and learn more about taxonomy, search and knowledge management? Look no further than the triple-slam event of the fall conference season:

Taxonomy Bootcamp / KM World / Enterprise Search Summit West
Register today with our discount code to save 200$!

Mark your calendars, cause we have a full slate of taxonomy-related presentations this year, including:

Workshop: Taxonomy Implementation & Integration (Seth Earley & Stephanie Lemieux)
Date: November 16, 2009 - 9:00 - 12:00
Come hear Seth & I talk about how some of the companies we've worked with have been able to implement their taxonomies and integrate them with WCM, ECM and digital asset management systems among others. Hear about practical applications of taxonomy within different classes of tools as well as technical integration challenges (hierarchy challenges, build-vs-buy issues, etc.).

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of giving a presentation on taxonomy vs. folksonomy in the enterprise to the Deloitte Social Tagging & Taxonomy Community of Practice, thanks to an invitation by fellow taxonomy enthusiasts Annie Wang and Lee Romero.

It was a fun presentation (a variation on this talk) and the audience asked some great questions afterwards. I was only able to answer a couple of questions before time ran out, so I offered to answer the rest on my blog. Here are the additional questions & answers:

1. Are there tools for auto-correcting social tags?

I had mentioned the idea that folksonomies are considered to be "self-correcting" or self-tuning - through volume of tags and users, anomalies (like single-use tags, misspellings, etc.) tend to be pushed to the side and the majority will trend towards correct/useful tags.This is an idea that I picked up from a whitepaper on social tagging by Oracle:

"All social input strategies rely on the good-graces of well-intentioned users habituated to provide input over time to succeed...  Social strategies will self-correct for this problem over time under the presumption that more users than not will provide “good” information."

I had the great pleasure of doing a podcast a few weeks ago with Paul Miller, podcaster for Nodalities (magazine & blog), on hybrid approaches to folksonomy and taxonomy and their role in the enterprise.

We discussed the now tired debate of folksonomy vs. taxonomy, and focused on the strengths and applications of each approach. I covered how organizations are leveraging social tagging and what some of the pitfalls are in the enterprise context.

I also talk a lot a few of the hybrid approaches to taxonomy & folksonomy:

• Co-existence
• Tag-influenced taxonomy
• Taxonomy-influenced tagging
• Tag hierarchies

So, I seem to have not been on the right RSS feed, because I totally missed the memo that ZigTag finally launched at the end of 2008.  I had signed up for the restricted Beta some time ago (there were 500 or so participants), and was awaiting the live version anxiously. ZigTag is a tagging/bookmarking tool that uses "defined" tags, whereby users choose from a controlled set of tags (through auto-complete) with semantic distinctions managed in a knowledge base.

For example, if you start typing in "Ital...", it will start populating a drop-down of choices asking you if you mean, Ital (Rastafarian food), Italy (the country), Italian (Culture of Italy), etc.  If there are multiple versions of one word (synonyms), they use parenthetical qualifiers to define them. Hovering over a term also brings up definitions (brought in from Wikipedia).

I think this tool is a great example of a hybrid between taxonomy and folksonomy... or even between ontology and folksonomy. We are able to eliminate many of the ptifalls of social tagging, such as: