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Emergent Semantics and Folksonomy
The idea of emergent semantics is to provide a light weight mechanism for defining a standard usage in markup. The mechanism is available to anyone with a web page. It might be a nice incremental mechanism for folksonomists to use as they themselves attempt to impose some order on their own emergent tagging behavior.
Sections: Emerging Practice
Topics: folksonomy SXSW
Folksonomy refers to how people organize their personally collected information into categories. Think of how you file documents in directories based on the project they are for. People are now applying the term to how they organize bookmarks in online bookmarking systems or photo sharing systems.
A lot of the power of folksonomy comes from being able to look across how a number of people are tagging an item and finding items tagged by other people with the same tag you are using. However, a major issue with folksonomy is that the tags you use are relatively undefined. You yourself may even forget what they mean and there is frequently tag drift as tags are used slightly differently by different people. Today, Eric Meyer gave an interesting talk on the idea of emergent semantics and suggested a mechanism that may help a bit with tag drift.
He and a number of other people have been working on a way of defining the semantics of various XHTML attributes using a fairly informal system. Essentially, you take an attribute such as the rel attribute of the XHTML <a> tag and define the meaning of some of its values. You then place this definition in a file on the web with a permanent URL (or more technically correctly URI). In the head of any XHTML document where you intend to put these attribute values, you put a declaration that you are using the attribute values as defined in the little definition document you created.
How would this be useful in folksonomy? Well, as tags start to become established, people might want to assert how they understand their meaning. You may actually just want to more clearly define a tag you have been using so you do not forget. This informal mechanism may be a nice incremental mechanism for doing so that does not impose the top down weight that typically chokes innovation.
Liz Lawley has blogged this same talk, and I think she gets it wrong. Just because the speaker, Eric Meyer, happened to present examples he had done in a group does not mean that he is attempting to impose top down techniques or completely usurp the mechanism I just described for an elite clique. Rather, what I heard was a general mechanism that anyone can use.
Bud posted this on March 13, 2005
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