Emanuele Quintarelli suggests that we go further than Peter Van Dijck‘s mefeedia that provides a few broad facets by which tags can be organized. Why not create a wiki at which users can create a much more detailed, hierarchical taxonomy that would know, for example, that Venice is not just a place but that it’s a place in Italy (as well as a place in the US)?

It might work, but it raises three key questions when it comes to tags and taxonomies:

1. Tags have succeeded because they require so little thought and can used without regard for their meaning beyond oneself. (I suspect many of us do consider social meanings, but one doesn’t have to.) Would a wiki that requires us to think about metadata work? Would enough people participate?

2. If enough people participate, could we come up with a universal taxonomy specific enough to be useful? Do we think about things in sufficiently the same ways?

3. If such a taxonomy existed, would we use it? It would be a bottom-up controlled vocabulary, but it’d still be a controlled vocabulary that requires people to look things up.

I suspect that having reduced the problem of metadata to its most elemental form — type in a word or two that will remind us of what a page or photo is about — we will now complexify it usefully to the point at which the complexity gets in the way. It’s impossible to predict where those various points will be. (Complexity reaches its own level of misunderstanding.) I thus don’t think we can predict where Emanuele’s suggestion falls, although I worry that it’s more appealing to information architects than to “normal” people. (Yeah yeah, info architects are normal people. Except not when it comes to information. Besides, have you ever hung out with information architects??? :) [Tags: everything-is_miscellaneous EverythingIsMiscellaneous information_architecture ia folksonomies taxonomy]

Categories: Uncategorized dw