Collaborative tagging

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Collaborative tagging is regarded as democratic folksonomy metadata generation, i.e. rather than an individual controlling the metadata or tags about an article or other content, metadata is generated by both the creator and consumers of the content.

This caters for the long tail of search terminology by deliberately introducing minority keywords and removes the restriction placed on the content of metadata by a controlled vocabulary.

Although a collaborative tagging system is more likely to generate meta noise, i.e. surperfluous metadata, this adds to the usefulness of the metadata as it continues to cater to the 'thin end' of the long tail of system users.

It differs from social bookmarking in that it relates to the tagging of content accessible to a large group from one place, rather than defining tags about content located elsewhere.

[edit] Further reading

• Web 2.0
• Semantic web
• Controlled vocabulary
• Metadata
• Meta noise
• Long tail

[edit] External links

• The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems A research paper published by HP Labs.
• Collaborative Tagging Approaches for Ontological Metadata in Adaptive E-Learning Systems (PDF).
• Specifying the Collaborative Tagging System