Tag

"Although they yield many benefits, the pre-eminence of controlled vocabularies has recently been challenged by the appearance of ‘collaborative tagging’ in a variety of prominent Web-based services (del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/, CiteULike: http://www.citeulike.org/, Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/, etc.). Collaborative tagging has emerged as a means of organising information resources on the Web and is contradictory to the ethos of controlled vocabularies. The use of controlled vocabularies - in conjunction with the wider activity of ‘high quality’ metadata creation (i.e. cataloguing) - remains a skilled process normally undertaken by highly trained information professionals. By contrast, collaborative tagging permits any user to assign keywords (or ‘tags’) to Web content". (Macgregor & McCulloch, 2006).

Macgregor, G. & McCulloch, E. (2006) Collaborative Tagging as a Knowledge Organisation and Resource Discovery Tool. Pre-Print: Accepted for – and to appear in - Library Review, Vol.55 No.5, pp. XXX. http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00005703/01/CollaborativeTaggingToolPaperGmEm_preprint.pdf

Quintarelli, E. (2005), "Folksonomies: power to the people", Proceedings of the 1st International Society for Knowledge Organization (Italy) (ISKOI), UniMIB Meeting, June 24, Milan, Italy, ISKOI, Italy, available at: http://www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm

Ruch, P.; Wagner, J.; Bouillon, P.; Baud, R. H.; Rassinoux, A. M. & Scherrer, J. R. (1999). MEDTAG: Tag-like semantics for medical document indexing. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, S, 137-141.

See also: Meta-tag (Core Concepts in LIS)