The Semantics of Tagging - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 105

Chapter 5
The Semantics of Tagging

You philosophers ask questions without answers, questions that
have to remain unanswered to deserve being called
philosophical. According to you, answered questions are only
technical matters. That's what they were to begin with.
Jean Lyotard (1988)

5.1 Making Sense of Tagging

During the last decade the Web has become a space where increasing numbers
of users create, share and store content, leading it to be viewed not only as an
“information space” (Berners-Lee 1996b) but also a “social space” (Hendler and
Golbeck 2008). This new step in the evolution of the Web, often referred to as the
'Web 2.0,' was shaped by the arrival of the different services that came into existence
to support users to easily publish content on the Web, such as photos (Flickr),
bookmarks ( del.icio.us ) , movies (YouTube), blogging (Wordpress), and others allow
users to tag URIs with keywords to facilitate retrieval both for the acting user and
for other users. Almost simultaneously with the growth of user-generated content
on the Web came a need to create order in this fast-growing unstructured data.
Tagging refers to the labeling of resources by means of free-form descriptive
natural language keywords, and tagging has become the predominant method for
organizing, searching and browsing online web-pages, as well as any other resource.
Sets of categories derived based on the tags used to characterize some resource
are commonly referred to as folksonomies. This approach to organizing online
information is usually contrasted with the formal ontologies used by the Semantic
Web, as in collaborative tagging systems where users themselves annotate resources
by tags they freely choose and thus form a 'flat space of names' without the
predefined and hierarchical structure characteristic of the Semantic Web ontologies.