Tag Links: the Next Stage of Tagging

(in progress, but published for now so i can think about it)

What if tags had inter-relationships? Labeled inter-relationships?

There’s been lots of noise about “folksonomies” (i.e. bottom-up, emergent, user-generated taxonomies of data) but they all seem to be focused on simple labeling of a particular dataset. The “namespace” of the tags is entirely flat. This is one of the basic strengths of these tagging systems, but also limits it. If current tags are ‘nodes’ of a taxonomy graph, the next stage is to define ‘edges’ between those tags.

These edges describe an inter-relationship between tags and can be tagged themselves. And thus the ‘folksonomy’ gets transformed into a ‘folksontology’ or something. A graph of label nodes with labeled edges is essentially a knowledge map (‘ontology’ to the big kids) and if created, may have applicability beyond the dataset that was used to initially generate it.

For instance, on flickr I take a picture of a café in Old Town Pasadena. I label it with “café” and “oldtown“. I could also label it with “pasadena” but to me “oldtown” is within “pasadena” so why should I have to redundantly specify that? I would prefer if I had some mechanism to link the “oldtown" tag with the "pasadena” tag. And maybe I label that link with the tag “is_within“. Now to me, all my photos with “oldtown” are now implicitly within “pasadena“. One can search my photos that are within pasadena by finding all “pasadena” photos and all photos with tags that link to “pasadena” with an “is_within” link.

Another application of links that I would like is the “is_synonym” link. I tag a coffeshop variously as a “café”, “cafe”, “coffeeshop”, or “coffee”. I would like to link all these tags together with “is_synonym”, because to me they all are. Another is the “subset_of”: I take pictures of my friends “alice”, “bob”, and “carol”. It bugs me to have to add the “friend” tag to each. I’d rather specify that “alice”, “bob”, and “carol” are all in the set of “friends”.

. . .

One could argue that allowing such tag-to-tag labeling would cause an exponential growth of data, all too varied to be of any use. The same thing was said of tagging in general, but I agree that links by their very N² nature have a greater propensity for explosion. Big deal, memory is cheap. (and actually, it’s worse than that if we allow multiple links between two given tags)

. . .

My hypothesis is that inside this resulting mesh of links between tags we would find well-worn paths between well-worn tags. If one cuts at a certain level of high use, the resulting graph might just be a useful general concept map.