using controlled vocabularies

What we will cover

• Introductions, including overview of education.au and edna • T1: taxonomies, thesauri, controlled vocabularies

• characteristics and benefits • some examples from education

• T2: social tagging and folksonomies• terminology and usage• characteristics and benefits• some examples

• Contrasting folksonomies and formal taxonomies• A hybrid approach• Questions and discussion

Finding the right words

The use of controlled vocabularies (thesauri) and user tagging (folksonomy) for managing information, with examples from current practice in education

Pru Mitchell and Sarah Hayman

Education.au

Collecting agent metadata

names

roles

tags

me.edu.au/p/pru

me.edu.au/p/sarahh

T1 Taxonomies, Thesauri and controlled vocabularies

• characteristics and benefits • some examples from education

What good is a thesaurus?

aids retrieval and resource discovery

closer alignment between search and browse

improves consistency of access

enhances interoperability

facilitates comprehensive access

But what about?

edna category

APAIS ATED SCIS SCOT VOCED

Lifelong learning

Careers Transition programs

Transition Education

Careers

Recurrent Education

Careers

Lifelong learning

Transition programs

Career development

Occupations (Work)

Career information

Lifelong learning

Transition from school to work

• new terminology

• differences in terminology

T2: Social tagging and folksonomies

Collaborative tagging Shared tagging User tagging Social bookmarking Collaborative bookmarking Social classification Folksonomy Tagsonomies Tagonomies Collabularies Tagosphere Folksonomic zeitgeist Crowdsourcing

Crowd filtering User-contributed tags Wisdom of the crowd

.

.

Social tagging: terminology and usage

TaggingNT1 User tagging

NT2 Social taggingUF Collaborative tagging

Shared tagging

RT Folksonomy(NT of Taxonomy)

RT Social bookmarking

Aspects of tagging usage

• How is it used? (types of tagging)• Why is it used?• Who does the tagging?• Folksonomies• Tagging triad (tag, tagger, item that is tagged)

Examples of social tagging• Flickr www.flickr.com

• Amazon www.amazon.com

• delicious www.delicious.com

• Librarything www.librarything.com

• Steve Museum project http://tagger.steve.museum/

• Blogs e.g. http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/

• me.edu.au www.me.edu.au

http://www.pimpampum.net/rt/tags/

http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Gardening-Handbook-Without-Boundaries/

Communities, Blog posts

Tagging on me.edu.au

Contrasting folksonomies and formal taxonomies

Folksonomies: benefits (general)

• Multidimensional• Meaningful words• Meaningful concepts• Shared• Simple and straightforward• Community development• Large scale brings organisation• Source of information about users

Contrasting folksonomies and formal taxonomiesFolksonomies: disadvantages (general)

• Poor choice and application, inconsistency, lack of objectivity• Tags with personal meanings used• Different terms for same concept• Same term for different concepts• Tags may change as trends evolve• Different language issues• Tags can be a mixture of types, genres, formats etc• Rules not applied (eg hyphens, spelling, singular/plural)• Tags only single word in some systems• Tagging vulnerable to malicious practice• Tags may over-represent dominant view• No formal structure linking tags

Managing folksonomies: a hybrid approach?

Some possibilities:

• New ways to harvest and manage tags (clustering, bundling) • Intersection of tags with social networks (rating tags)• Hybrid systems: combining formal taxonomies with folksonomies

Tagging on Scootle

• tagging by users• tagging by information managers• search terms displayed as tag cloud

Steve Museum project www.steve.museum

http://steve.museum/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=23

•Model Car•Toy•Marklin•Tinplate

Some examples from community information

http://www.easthampshire.org/Has tag cloud

http://homelessnessinfo.net.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&layout=form&Itemid=319Users can submit content with their own keywords

http://blogs.abc.net.au/heywire/Uses technorati tags

http://www.talkbx.com/User tags, has tag cloud

http://www.missionaustralia.com.au/Has tag cloud but do not appear to be user tags

Any questions, comments, suggestions welcome

Pru MitchellSenior Education Officer, Education and Training Serviceseducation.aupmitchell@educationau.edu.au

Sarah HaymanAssistant Manager, Information Management and Collectionseducation.aushayman@educationau.edu.au