The advent of the internet has provided us with a proliferation of online resources but has also presented us with the need to find a mechanism to enable the organisation and discovery of these resources.
DC metadata was developed primarily to assist with the discovery of information and resources. It provided a structure for the description of resources in a consistent manner. Metadata over the years has been created not by experts such as librarians and cataloguers but by people in different professions and backgrounds such as teachers, web developers, authors and anyone interested in managing online resources and services.
More recently, Web 2.0 technologies and applications have enabled the way for the prominence of ’social tagging’. That is tagging of resources by end users. The question facing many online service managers now is how can aspects of this informal process be formalized and utilized for resource discovery.
At the recent DC-2006 Conference in Mexico on 6 October 2006, a Special session was held on Social Networks - Tagging and DC metadata. Following on from that session a number of other activities have taken place. Liddy Neville has set up DCMI Social Tagging Community
The DCMI Social Tagging Community is for those who are interested in investigating how the increasingly common practice of informally tagging resources, known as a process of social tagging, can contribute to the goals of the DCMI. It is clear that there is a lot of work being done that might, if slightly formalised, contribute to the quantum of DC metadata in useful ways. It is also of interest to see how tagging can point to terms that are in common use that may be of interest to those developing ontologies, thesauri and controlled vocabularies. There may be other aspects of the practice of tagging that can contribute in some way to DCMI activities.
It is not clear how tagging relates to the activities and practices of the Dublin Core general community, or how tags relate to other metadata, but these are considered interesting questions worthy of discussion.
The Community has a website at: http://dublincore.org/groups/social-tagging/.
A wiki at: http://dublincore.org/taggingwiki/
An email list: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?SUBED1=dc-social-tagging&A=1
4 Comments
interesting - thanks for sharing
“The need to find a MECHANISM to enable the organisation and discovery of these RESOURCES”.
Funny how by asking a question it can limit us to see possibilities. Questions about ‘mechanisms’ and ‘resources’ always means that we’re taking an industrial approach to believing we might find an answer.
It leads us to believe that by finding better ways to classify information resources we might find a key to greater utility. I’ll contend that an answer can’t be found by taking this industrial approach. And that if one approaches the Internet’s development, and the organisation of its Virtual Organisations from the Communications end and not the Web, we might have a chance of finding a key.
So our question might be; “what taxonomy could be used, which might enable similar (national and) global communities to aggregate their Information and Communications Hubs, and give them a fixed position in cyberspace?
More?http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/mod/forum/view.php?f=4630
It seems to me that these are not incompatible. Thesauri and synonyms used to link fixed vocabs for informal ones. you can look at what social tagging has been used and infer what might be good formal vocabs. Got to tell Liddy this.
D.
Daniel, I agree with you that there is value in the use of informal tagging. In the past and probably still, log files were and are used to see how users attempt to find information. For me informal tagging is about ones view of the world. How I would like to organise and rediscover information and resources. It’s really about empowerment of the end-user. Service providers, who provide this functionality, are in fact engaging the end-user in information management practices.
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