using controlled vocabularies
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
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/
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 [email protected]
Sarah HaymanAssistant Manager, Information Management and [email protected]