Jason Toal had a paper accepted for presentation at the IA Summit. It’s called “The Life of Tags,” (abstract) : “Our paper will pursue potential opportunities for adding a usable layer of rules to the process of tagging.” The sorts of rules are like those in cellular automata systems, such as the game of Life. The abstract puts aside using ontologies to disambiguate tags. Sounds interesting.

So, the first thing Jason did upon hearing his (their?) paper had been accepted was to set up a blog to work on it in public. I know doing this isn’t news, but it still gives me just a smidgeon of hope. What a difference from how research was done ten years ago!

By the way, at the blog I found a link to STEVE — Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement — a project developed by a group of museums to enable social filtering of their collections. Jason writes: “Steve is an attempt to democratize a collections catalogue, not by replacing the curators perspective, but by adding an additional layer of information provided by the public.” Cool. [Tags: jasonToal iaSummit ia taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous museums cellularAutomata]

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