A Manifesto for Tags
Posted by Daniel Butler Tue, 19 Sep 2006 23:05:00 GMT
Someone from Manchester, England’s vagueware.com–Innovation in Software blog (presumably Paul Robinson) wrote an excellent article describing the modern need for “tags” for classifying information in the digital realm. Here’s the problem: it’s hard to find stuff that you don’t know that much about … yet. In the classic Dewey Decimal System method, you go find one book about something you’re interested in, and viola, there’s more right there. But with information, how to you create a “distance function” that allows information to be found near other information that is similar. He conveys the scope of the problem:
It gets worse when you realise that you could be dealing with not just a few thousand items in a library, but the entire sum of human knowledge. Every document, photo, film, sound recording, computer program and physical object. Imagine trying to classify and then later find everything related to piegeons, cooking and hunting in that lot.
So instead of taxonomies, hierarchies, ontologies, we have something that is quite easy and powerful: tagging. Paul continues:
The purpose of tagging is to replace taxonomies. We want to do this for lots of reasons, including:
- We don’t want to have to worry about where we put stuff into the system. We want to mark the item up without having to spend an hour - or decade - debating which part of the taxonomy it belongs in.
- We want to know it can be easily retrieved by those who may be interested in finding it at a later date.
- We want to be able to easily find ‘neighbours’ even if they belong in a traditionally unrelated taxonomy.
Overall, a well-written manifesto which you should read if you have any question about how tags can and will help you in your information-filled future.
