Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy & Folksonmy

Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy & Folksonomy Semantic T e chnology, 2009 Stephanie Lemieux Earley & Associates [email_address] www.earley.com

Agenda
The taxonomy/folksonomy debate
Tagging pitfalls
Social tagging & the enterprise
Hybrid approaches to taxonomy/folksonomy
Corporate tagging tools

About me
Stephanie Lemieux
Senior Consultant at Earley & Associates, Inc.
Masters in Library and Information Studies (MLIS), specializing in taxonomy development, content management, search, IA
Developed enterprise taxonomies and helped a variety of clients through CMS deployments
Projects include: Motorola, Ford Foundation, Best Buy, American Greetings, Urban Land Institute
Blog: http://sethearley.wordpress.com/

The tired debate Taxonomy Folksonomy Control Democracy Top-down Bottom-up Arduous process Just do it Accurate Good enough Restrictive Flexible Static Evolving Expensive to maintain Low cost – “crowdsourced”

The relevance problem
Search results should be relevant to what a searcher wants, but technology can only determine if it is relevant to a search term*
Taxonomies and folksonomies = 2 approaches to the problem of relevance with common goal of describing content, each with particular gaps
*Billy Cripe: Folksonomy, Keywords & Tags: Social & Democratic User Interaction in Enterprise Content Management http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/content-management/pdf/OracleSocialTaggingWhitePaper.pdf

Taxonomy
Added by a small number of individuals: author/originators or “authorized” persons (e.g.librarian)
Describes meaning or purpose of content based on a set view point for a specific audience using a controlled vocabulary
Relationships between terms defined
Hierarchical (e.g. Computer hardware > Keyboard)
Associative (e.g. Computer hardware – Software)
Equivalent (e.g. Laptop = Notebook Computer)

Tags
Added by authors and consumers (individual motivation)
Can connote any type of meaning or purpose
No compression around a single viewpoint, no control of vocabulary
Self-correcting through volume

Why tagging is so interesting…
Adding individual value to the act of classification – user control over findability
Reducing the cognitive burden (i.e. it’s easy)
Reduced technological investment (i.e. it’s cheap)
Can leverage emergent structure (folksonomy)
Reno| Tags

The downside…
Neither tags nor taggers are perfect …
No language control
Guy & Tonkin, 2006.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html
Study: 40% of flickr tags and 28% of del.icio.us tags were flawed in these ways Misspellings Library vs. libary Plam pilot Compound words TimBernersLee Case & number Folksonomy, Folksonomies Personal tags To read My dog @work Single-use tags Billybobsdog

The downside…
Varying levels of granularity
Same tag, different meanings
Lack of relationships between tags – which is broader? Narrower?
Lack of consistency/approach to change – even single user can change language and hamper own personal retrieval
Robin Bird Turdus migratorinus … Known as “tag noise”

The downside…
Most tag search does not account for stemming, plurals, etc.
E.g. Search on Delicious: Folksonomy: 16049 Folksonomies: 4404 Both: 2642

The tagging hype cycle http://www.pui.ch/phred/archives/2007/05/tag-history-and-gartners-hype-cycles.html

The web vs. the enterprise
Shirky: “there is no shelf”
Traditional organization schemes are built to deal with physical collections and constraints.
They don’t work well on the web
large corpus
no clear edges
no formal categories
no authority
The enterprise is much more defined
smaller corpuses
formal entities
coordinated users, clear tasks
need for reliable retrieval
E.g. Flickr Delicious Social tagging works well in this context Social tagging is more of a challenge, needs clear arena

R o le of folksonomy in the enterprise?
Tagging external links
Seeing what colleagues are interested in
Sharing links with a specific team
Subscribing to link feeds
Monitoring news/blog coverage of the company
Consumer/competitor research
Tracking industry trends
Tagging internal links
Finding/facilitating access to most popular pages on the intranet
Seeing what intranet pages mean to staff

Role of folksonomy in the enterprise?
Social aspects
Identifying subject matter experts
Connecting people who share interests
Encouraging collaboration & resource sharing
Improve your taxonomy, information retrieval
User tagging to refine the corporate taxonomy
New concepts
New terminology
Seeing what employees find interesting
Distributing tagging tasks

The downside…
Potential issues of security, inappropriateness
Can implement some level of vetting
Privacy concerns
Can be anonymous tagging, although this removes some social value
Can create role or team-based collections
Need higher ratio of active participants due to population size

Message text External News Reports Discussion postings Links Engineering document repositories Success Stories Policies Approved Methods Best Practices Key concept: Not all content is created equally The content continuum Lower Cost Higher Cost Tagging/Organizing Processes Unfiltered Reviewed/Vetted/Approved Lower Value Higher Value

What if we blended the two?
Folksonomy / Taxonomy
Low cost Findability Flexible Structured relationships User terminology Oversight Social sharing Consistency

Hybrid approaches Co-existence Tag-influenced taxonomy Taxonomy influenced tagging Tag hierarchies/ontologies

Co-existence
Taxonomy and folksonomy are used side by side
Strengths of each approach preserved, philosophy of each kept “pure”
Web example: Flickr & Library of Congress: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/

Co-existence – public library

Raytheon – corporate example
Used in Raytheon employee portal - website lists (“Suggested sites” feature box)
How does it work:
inserted “Suggested Sites” in a "feature" box to the right of the regularly ranked results
website suggestions (URLs) submitted along with recommended tags/keyword which are subsequently verified and approved by librarians
http://www.slideshare.net/CJMConnors/i-kms-singapore-presentation

Variation: Tag mediation
Vetting & editing tags
Pros:
Weeds out potentially inappropriate tags
Eliminates misspellings, plural issues, etc.
Some can be done automatically (spell-checker, e.g.)
Enhances findability
Cons:
Higher effort/cost
Perceived lack of trust
Who knows better?

Tag-influenced taxonomy
Taxonomy & tagging co-exist, tags serve as pool of candidate terms to enrich taxonomy, keep it current
Find new terminology (synonyms, popular language)
Find new concepts
Performed as separate processes (taxonomy tagging=formal, tagging=informal) or combined in single interface

Tag-influenced taxonomy
Requires formal vetting process
Can be supported by automation (e.g. candidate tags pulled & filtered with script to remove taxonomy terms, stop words)
Evaluate candidates based on
Frequency (“literary warrant”)
Salience within context
Look at tags used in conjunction with taxonomy

Taxonomy-influenced tagging
Presenting choices/suggestions to user from controlled set of terms/tags
Sometimes users prefer easy choice
Drop-down menus
Check boxes
Type ahead
Tree view
“ influenced” – option to enter own tag? Good source of new terms
Enforces consistency
Offers structure

WWW example: ZigTag (2008) Definitions from Wikipedia & Wordnet Tagging with type-ahead against database of 3M unique concepts & 8M synonyms

Zigtag
Type ahead & synonyms encourage consistency
Users can enter new tags
Synonyms based on Wikipedia, so can be “dirty data”
No hierarchy, only equivalent relationships so far

Zigtag search Still get problems with uncontrolled tags & recall Interesting relationships from Wikipedia Browesable tag cloud

Example: myedna (Education.au) http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/papers/tagging_hayman.ppt Fully taxonomy-directed tagging

Buzzillions.com
Review site: tags are “controlled” not against a taxonomy, but against other tags – reduces redundancy
Only popular tags exposed as faceted navigation
© 2008

SharePoint?
Plugins make taxonomy easy, present like tags
E.g. KWizCom: plugin manages taxonomy and tags in easy interface… can opt-out of letting users create own tags

Taxonomy-directed tagging
Pros:
More consistency
Better support for findability
Relationships, definitions leveraged – adding meaning to the tags
Realistic for the enterprise
Cons:
Not really folksonomy anymore..
Can be forcing terminology on user
Need to develop reference list of concepts – manually through taxonomy or need large corpus to derive automatically

Tag hierarchies
2 flavors: user-powered, automatic derivation
User-powered
Social approach
Bogus hierarchies possible
Small population will contribute
RawSugar tried it (no longer around): taggers could specify hierarchy in own account, tags clustered in a based on common groups

Raw Sugar example

More user-powered tag relationships
E.g. LibraryThing
LibraryThing allows any use to combine (or uncombine) 2 tags that are semantically equivalent. www.librarything.com

Automatic derivation
Tag hiearchies, facets, ontologies, or “folksontology”
Done through statistical/clustering algorithms
http://www.pui.ch/phred/automated_tag_clustering/

Delicious & citeulike hiearchy http://heymann.stanford.edu/taghierarchy.html

Clustering at Flickr

Auto clustering/facets
Still not very mature
Time-sensitive
Community- sensitive
Ambiguous tags
Improve with volume (self- correcting)
http://www.pui.ch/phred/automated_tag_clustering/

Intelligent tags
Moving toward more semantic tagging with machine readable tags
Flickr: can tag images with machine tags
e.g. “geo:quartier=“SoHo”
namespace:predicate=value
e.g. “lastfm:event=34640” – makes your photo appear on a lastfm event page

Intelligent tags
MOAT: Meaning of a tag – part of linked data movement, mapping tags to semantic web
http://moat-project.org/
Adding to the triplet
User – resource – tag – meaning
Meaning = URI to a resource containing meaning (e.g. DBPedia)
<tag:RestrictedTagging> <tag:taggedResource rdf:resource="http://example.org/post/1"/> <foaf:maker rdf:resource="http://apassant.net/alex"/> <tag:associatedTag rdf:resource="http://tags.moat-project.org/tag/ apple "/> <moat:tagMeaning rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Records"/> </tag:RestrictedTagging>

Conclusion
Not all content is created equal – tags and taxonomies have their sweet spots
Hybrid approaches are emerging
taxonomy-influenced tagging leading the pack in popularity on the web
co-existence in the enterprise
Look for more developments on the semantic web/linked data front for making tags more intelligent

Corporate social tagging software http://www.connectbeam.com/

Corporate social tagging software http://www.cogenz.com/

Corporate social tagging software http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/connections/dogear.html

Corporate social tagging software
BEA AquaLogic Pathways
http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=index.jsp&FP=/content/products/aqualogic/pathways/
© 2008

Corporate social tagging software
http://www.newsgator.com/business/socialsites/default.aspx

Questions? Stephanie Lemieux [email_address] www.earley.com 781-444-0287 Blog : sethearley.wordpress.com Twitter : stephlemieux Send an email to [email_address] for a free pass to one of our conference calls.

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Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy & Folksonmy

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Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy & Folksonmy — Presentation Transcript