Tagging is everywhere. People tags blog posts, pictures, emails, or any other type of digital documents. I already wrote about tagging, and some doubts I had vis-à-vis the social tagging and where tagging principles could be useful to be implemented.

However, what I would like to talk about here is the behavior of tagging. Everywhere people have to tags things, any things. People have to think about how they will classify an entity. They will think about the best words that would semantically describe a given digital document. The best thing that tagging can bring is the “classification of documents described by semantically related keywords” behavior of the Internet users.

As I talked in that post, there are two ways to create an ontology for the semantic web: collaboratively or non-collaboratively. The easiest and less expensive way to create an ontology is definitely by collaboration. However, who say collaboration, usually say anybody that has a personal computer and an Internet access can collaborate to it. Without any knowledge and practice of describing semantically an entity, the ontologies would be near useless considering that anybody could describe anything by anything.

It is why the learned behavior of tagging is essential for the future development of collaborative ontologies development. If that skill is not globally learned (at least for the people that would describe something in an ontology) resulting ontologies would be worthless and even destructive for the semantic web.

2 thoughts on “Why tagging is good for the future of the semantic web? A behavior learning perspective.

  1. There’s a lot involved with such universal learning. I just showed my readers a very simple to use Technorati Tag bookmarklet, but it wasn’t working for them without also adding pinging to their routine. That might seem routine to us, but not to the growing world of new bloggers. I wrote about it at http://marshallk.com/how-to-be-found-by-technorati

  2. Hi Mr. Kirkpatrick,

    It is sure that it is not done. As you pointed out: there is a growing world of new bloggers, probably my mom and your dad, etc.: all people that are not familiar with all these technologies and what they implies. I remember that people, 10 years ago, were not able to open a web browser, and did not know how to perform a web search. Now everything changed and mostly anybody know how. The problem is that blogging, pinging, web feed reader, tagging, etc. are new concepts and new methodologies, not so simple and intuitive as we could think. We will have to make these technologies even more intuitive and user friendly, and people will have to learn what it is all about, why they could use them, how these new technologies can help them in their life, etc. Only then we will be able to introduce new concepts like the semantic web. Before that time, I have some doubts that it could be realist to try to make it globally accepted (for the only point of view of the collaborative ontologies development, otherwise all the SW things are and would be transparent to the users).

    Thanks for this comment and the link to you post,

    Salutations,

    Fred

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