[LINK] Categories for a community directory

[Roger Clarke]

At 9:01 +1100 13/3/12, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
>Tagging/Keywords are the way to go. A piece of information can be
>categorised/viewed in lots of contexts.
>
>The current directory categories for Annandale on the Web
><http://ramin.com.au/annandale/ > are:
>*Art, Music & Food
>*Community
>*Business Services
>*Abode (hardware etc but you can't say "Home")
>*Useful Numbers and Websites (emergency numbers etc)
...

It's always tempting to follow the line of least resistance, go with 
the flow, 'just do it', avoid discipline and just have fun.

But we might do well to keep in mind the consequences of that approach.

Every directory in every volunteer community, and every local 
council, in every country, will do their own thing, pragmatically, 
spasmodically, unreliably, incompletely.

It will be impossible to map between the multiple folksonomies.

Inter-operability will not exist, and re-usability will not be achieved.

Folksonomies work fine if it's just for fun (Flickr), or short-term, 
or localised.

But if Paul's thinking bigger, longer-term or more professionally, he 
should consider a more disciplined approach.  (And the very fact that 
he asked the question suggests he was thinking in one or more of 
those ways).


I've not worked in this area for a while.  Are there any decent 
publications on how to use folksonomies and taxonomies in parallel, 
preferably leveraging off one another?  One obvious way is to allow a 
period of chaos early on, then re-assess the available tag-set 
against published taxonomies.


>Since 1998, I have encoded DC metadata into the HTML content of Annandale
on the Web. However, the discussion we had on link, a little while back,
concluded that DC is dead.

In 1997, I identified a bunch of problems with DC, and proposed ways 
of achieving ease-of-use.  I don't think much was done along the 
lines I was suggesting.  (I did some consultancies for government 
agencies in the area, but they never picked up on the key 
recommendations - sound familiar?):
http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/DublinCore.html

Unless it became really, really easy to do, disciplined tagging was 
never going to happen, and hence DC was destined to never reach 
critical mass.

Marganita, you were far, far more committed than I ever was.  I only 
ever DC-meta-tagged one, single paper - that one on the Dublin Core 
...


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/

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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law               University of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University