Tag (metadata)
In
Tagging was popularized by
Overview
People use tags to aid
Tagging gained popularity due to the growth of
Tagging systems have sometimes been classified into two kinds: top-down and bottom-up.
When tags or other taxonomies have further properties (or
: 56–62Metadata tags as described in this article should not be confused with the use of the word "tag" in some software to refer to an automatically generated cross-reference; examples of the latter are tags tables in Emacs[15] and smart tags in Microsoft Office.[16]
History
The use of keywords as part of an identification and classification system long predates computers. Paper data storage devices, notably edge-notched cards, that permitted classification and sorting by multiple criteria were already in use prior to the twentieth century, and faceted classification has been used by libraries since the 1930s.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the
In 1997, the collaborative portal "A Description of the Equator and Some ØtherLands" produced by documenta X, Germany, used the folksonomic term Tag for its co-authors and guest authors on its Upload page.[18] In "The Equator" the term Tag for user-input was described as an abstract literal or keyword to aid the user. However, users defined singular Tags, and did not share Tags at that point.
In 2003, the
Examples
Within a blog
Many systems (and other web
Within application software
Some
Assigned to computer files
There are various systems for applying tags to the files in a computer's file system.
In
Several semantic file systems that implement tags are available for the Linux kernel, including Tagsistant.[29]
Microsoft Windows allows users to set tags only on Microsoft Office documents and some kinds of picture files.[30]
For an event
An official tag is a keyword adopted by events and conferences for participants to use in their web publications, such as blog entries, photos of the event, and presentation slides.[34] Search engines can then index them to make relevant materials related to the event searchable in a uniform way. In this case, the tag is part of a controlled vocabulary.
In research
A researcher may work with a large collection of items (e.g. press quotes, a bibliography, images) in digital form. If he/she wishes to associate each with a small number of themes (e.g. to chapters of a book, or to sub-themes of the overall subject), then a group of tags for these themes can be attached to each of the items in the larger collection.[35] In this way, freeform classification allows the author to manage what would otherwise be unwieldy amounts of information.[36]
Special types
Triple tags
A triple tag or machine tag uses a special
geo:long=50.123456
is a tag for the geographical longitude coordinate whose value is 50.123456. This triple structure is similar to the Resource Description FrameworkThe triple tag format was first devised for geolicious in November 2004,[38] to map Delicious bookmarks, and gained wider acceptance after its adoption by Mappr and GeoBloggers to map Flickr photos.[39] In January 2007, Aaron Straup Cope at Flickr introduced the term machine tag as an alternative name for the triple tag, adding some questions and answers on purpose, syntax, and use.[40]
Specialized metadata for geographical identification is known as geotagging; machine tags are also used for other purposes, such as identifying photos taken at a specific event or naming species using binomial nomenclature.[41]
Hashtags
A hashtag is a kind of metadata tag marked by the prefix #
, sometimes known as a "hash" symbol. This form of tagging is used on
Knowledge tags
A knowledge tag is a type of
Knowledge tags are part of a
Advantages and disadvantages
In a typical tagging system, there is no explicit information about the meaning or semantics of each tag, and a user can apply new tags to an item as easily as applying older tags.[2] Hierarchical classification systems can be slow to change, and are rooted in the culture and era that created them; in contrast, the flexibility of tagging allows users to classify their collections of items in the ways that they find useful, but the personalized variety of terms can present challenges when searching and browsing.
When users can freely choose tags (creating a folksonomy, as opposed to selecting terms from a controlled vocabulary), the resulting metadata can include homonyms (the same tags used with different meanings) and synonyms (multiple tags for the same concept), which may lead to inappropriate connections between items and inefficient searches for information about a subject.[45] For example, the tag "orange" may refer to the fruit or the color, and items related to a version of the Linux kernel may be tagged "Linux", "kernel", "Penguin", "software", or a variety of other terms. Users can also choose tags that are different inflections of words (such as singular and plural),[46] which can contribute to navigation difficulties if the system does not include stemming of tags when searching or browsing. Larger-scale folksonomies address some of the problems of tagging, in that users of tagging systems tend to notice the current use of "tag terms" within these systems, and thus use existing tags in order to easily form connections to related items. In this way, folksonomies may collectively develop a partial set of tagging conventions.
Complex system dynamics
Despite the apparent lack of control, research has shown that a simple form of shared vocabulary emerges in social bookmarking systems. Collaborative tagging exhibits a form of complex systems dynamics (or self-organizing dynamics).[47] Thus, even if no central controlled vocabulary constrains the actions of individual users, the distribution of tags converges over time to stable power law distributions.[47] Once such stable distributions form, simple folksonomic vocabularies can be extracted by examining the correlations that form between different tags. In addition, research has suggested that it is easier for machine learning algorithms to learn tag semantics when users tag "verbosely"—when they annotate resources with a wealth of freely associated, descriptive keywords.[48]
Spamming
Tagging systems open to the public are also open to tag spam, in which people apply an excessive number of tags or unrelated tags to an item (such as a YouTube video) in order to attract viewers. This abuse can be mitigated using human or statistical identification of spam items.[49] The number of tags allowed may also be limited to reduce spam.
Syntax
Some tagging systems provide a single
A syntax for use within
rel="tag"
) to indicate that the linked-to page acts as a tag for the current context.[50]See also
- Annotation
- Collective intelligence
- Concept map
- Enterprise bookmarking
- Enterprise social software
- Expert system
- Explicit knowledge
- Human–computer interaction
- Information ecology
- Knowledge transfer
- Knowledge worker
- Management information system
- Meta-knowledge
- Organizational memory
- RRID
- Semantics
- Semantic Web
- Social network aggregation
- Subject (documents)
- Subject indexing
Notes
References
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- ^ Hampton-Smith, Sam (12 April 2013). "The pro designer's guide to photo organization". creativebloq.com. Archived from the original on 16 April 2013. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
As with all the other options here, meta data can be added to individual files to help improve their find-ability, and uniquely the tag cloud field within Leap's interface allows you to quickly drill down to individually labelled files without fuss.
- PC Magazine. Archived from the originalon 11 July 2015. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ Heymann, Paul; Garcia-Molina, Hector (2006). Collaborative creation of communal hierarchical taxonomies in social tagging systems (Technical report). Stanford University. Summarized in: Heymann, Paul (2006). "Tag hierarchies". infolab.stanford.edu. Archived from the original on 25 June 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
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- ^ Wilson, Katie (2007). "OPAC 2.0: next generation online library catalogues ride the Web 2.0 wave!". Online Currents. 21 (10): 406–413. Archived from the original on 2017-07-31. Retrieved 2017-03-11.
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- ^ Willey, Eric (2011). "A cautious partnership: the growing acceptance of folksonomy as a complement to indexing digital images and catalogs". Library Student Journal. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
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Calling a function defined in one compilation unit from within another is analogous to cross references in large hypertext documents. By using tags tables, the Emacs environment enables the user to turn program source code into powerful hypertext documents.
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You can turn on smart tags for a field to make it easier to cross-reference data between the Access database and Microsoft Outlook (or another personal information and e-mail program) and the Web.
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EMACS is an M.I.T. display editor designed to be 'extensible, customizable, and self-documenting' [...] Another interesting facility for program editing is the TAGS package. The separate program TAGS builds a TAGS table containing the file name and position in that file in which each application program function is defined. This table is loaded into EMACS; specifying the command Meta, function name causes EMACS to select the appropriate file and go to the proper function definition within that file.
- ^ "A Description of the Equator and Some ØtherLands". aporee.org. Archived from the original on 18 August 2001. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ See, for example: Screenshot of tags on del.icio.us in 2004 and Screenshot of a tag page on del.icio.us, also in 2004, both published by Joshua Schachter on July 9, 2007.
- ^ Garrett, Jesse James (4 August 2005). "An Interview with Flickr's Eric Costello". Archived from the original on 18 October 2017. Retrieved 21 September 2017.
Tags were not in the initial version of Flickr. Stewart Butterfield wanted to add them. He liked the way they worked on del.icio.us, the social bookmarking application. We added very simple tagging functionality, so you could tag your photos, and then look at all your photos with a particular tag, or any one person's photos with a particular tag. Soon thereafter, users started telling us that what was really interesting about tagging was not just how you've tagged your photos, but how the whole Flickr community has been tagging photos. So we started seeing a lot of requests from users to be able to see a global view of the tagscape.
- ^ Mathes, Adam (December 2004). "Folksonomies: cooperative classification and communication through shared metadata". adammathes.com. Archived from the original on 9 March 2017. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
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- ^ Bray, Tim (1 February 2007). "A Uniform Resource Name (URN) namespace for tag metadata". tbray.org. Archived from the original on 5 November 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ "Firefox tip: find bookmarks faster with tags". blog.mozilla.org. Mozilla Foundation. Archived from the original on 12 October 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
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- ^ Siracusa, John (22 October 2013). "OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review: Tags". arstechnica.com. Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 9 January 2017. Retrieved 10 March 2013.
- ^ Cherp, Aleh (17 March 2011). "Tagging". macademic.org. Academic workflows on a Mac. Archived from the original on 30 April 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ "Extended attributes and tag file systems". lesbonscomptes.com. 2 July 2015. Archived from the original on 11 August 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ Schultz, Greg (23 March 2011). "Tag your files for easier searches in Windows 7". techrepublic.com. TechRepublic. Archived from the original on 29 August 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ Gasiorowski-Denis, Elizabeth (22 March 2012). "Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) becomes an ISO standard". iso.org. International Organization for Standardization. Archived from the original on 10 March 2017. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
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- ^ Devcic, Ivana Isadora (9 October 2015). "Tag, you're it! How to manage files on Linux with TagSpaces". makeuseof.com. MakeUseOf. Archived from the original on 28 December 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ Finch, Curt (26 May 2011). "Hashtag techniques for businesses". inc.com. Inc. Magazine. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ Parry, David (11 March 2007). "Tagging files—or how to keep research organized". academhack.outsidethetext.com. Archived from the original on 2 August 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
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- ^ Maron, Mikel (5 November 2004). "geo.lici.us: geotagging hosted services". brainoff.com. Archived from the original on 28 April 2007. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ Catt, Dan (11 January 2006). "Advanced Tagging and TripleTags". Archived from the original on 11 October 2007. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ Straup Cope, Aaron (24 January 2007). "Machine tags". flickr.com. Archived from the original on 20 April 2016. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ "The Encyclopedia of Life Flickr group rules". flickr.com. Encyclopedia of Life. Archived from the original on 10 February 2017. Retrieved 10 March 2017. Includes the required use of a taxonomy machine tag.
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- ^ Alavi, Maryam; Leidner, Dorothy E. (February 1999). "Knowledge management systems: issues, challenges, and benefits". Communications of the AIS. 1 (2es): 1.
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- ^ Devens, Keith (24 December 2004). "Singular vs. plural tags in a tag-based categorization system (such as del.icio.us)". keithdevens.com. Archived from the original on 10 May 2012. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
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- ^ Heymann, Paul. "Tag spam". stanford.edu. Stanford University. Retrieved 10 March 2017.
- ^ "Microformats wiki: rel='tag'". microformats.org. 10 January 2005. Retrieved 10 March 2017.