Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
Paper-based Tagging of Documents
Besides annotating documents and creating references, categorizing documents and
structuring the information space are amongst the most relevant activities that
knowledge workers perform when they seek to make sense of information. Struc-
turing documents and collections of documents, translating them into higher-level
concepts and establishing relationships between concepts is crucial for successful
knowledge work. Tagging can transform an unsorted and possibly confusing col-
lection of a large number of disparate documents to a unified and well-structured
document space. Moreover, a well-structured document space fosters understand-
ing and retrieval of information:
Scenario 15 (Creating concepts) Sally uses tags to prioritize documents accord-
ing to their relevance for her research questions. In a subsequent step, she system-
atizes the information: She first identifies abstract concepts. Then she tags each im-
portant passage with the appropriate concept. By doing so, she has not only under-
stood the individual aspects but has acquired structural knowledge of the problem
domain.
This scenario gives only two examples of how tags can be used for successful
learning. Tags support a variety of other activities. These include for instance struc-
turing a domain with abstract concepts and relating these to document passages,
marking up the structure of a document (e.g. by tagging the section headings), and
prioritizing documents. Further activities comprise recommending documents to a
collaborator (e.g. by tagging documents with his or her name), labeling a document
with the physical place it is filed to easily find it at a later point in time, and struc-
turing the temporal process of meetings.
This chapter presents pen-based and tangible interaction techniques for cross-
media tagging. We define a tag as follows: A tag is a concept which is assigned
to an entity, i.e. to an artifact or to a process. The concept is represented either
by a predefined category (category tagging) or by one or several keywords which
are freely chosen by the user (free tagging) . The same concept can be assigned
to several entities. If appropriate, we will distinguish between the tag concept (a
 
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