Design theory: The advantages and disadvantages of tagging

Note: This article is published in the 10th issue of the programmer, which is abridged.

tag, literal translation label, is a user-defined keyword used to describe information [1]. Tagging is the behavior that users give tag to information. The development of Delicious,flikr and other Web2.0 websites has promoted its popularity, making it a common function of social bookmarking, album services, blogs and other websites. But tagging to the user is a kind of mental burden is not light behavior: to classify information is not easy, do not discuss descriptive information. For a piece of information, should tag class or attribute? Should the category be wider or narrower? Tag the more the better, or control in a certain amount? Especially difficult is, because is not beforehand planning, not very well expected to be tagged content development, Getting started, maintenance is not easy. But from the current network development situation--the individual generated content (Bowen, pictures, video, etc.) rapidly increased, all kinds of information mass influx to--tag is a powerful tool for information management. This article in the literature review of the way, respectively, discussed: 1. The advantages and disadvantages of tagging; 2. Tagging system and its UI design

1. Advantages and disadvantages of tagging

1-1. Tag and tagging

tag as metadata (metadata): metadata is the so-called description of data/information data, tag is a user-created metadata, characterized by no hierarchy, customization.

tagging constitutes a classification (folksonomy): The classification of the public, refers to the mass spontaneous use of tag to describe and classify information, the formation of the information Architecture and traditional classification (taxonomy) information organization. The difference is shown in table 1 below:

Table 1:taxonomy VS. Folksonomy

1-2. Tagging's benefit

Combined with table 1, the following benefits of tagging can be summed up:

Make information Organization more economical, efficient and flexible.

As the author of "The Future is Wet" says, "only everyone can classify all the information." When the information is more, the disadvantage of the traditional classification is more obvious--the development and maintenance cost will only rise and not drop; Based on the tagging, the use of mass power of the classification is the opposite. In particular, the current trend is that more and more individual generation information, the system classification, description ability and efficiency can be said far less than the content creator itself.

The information is indexed and described more richly.

(1) tag is not as good as the traditional classification of the control List (thesaurus) so strict standards, but because the information can be infinitely many people give infinite tag, so the vast network of the sea as long as you think of a person with the description, search more organic will be obtained. It may be more difficult to use the specialized words in the Glossary of experts. For images, video, audio systems with extremely high cost and low efficiency, the value of tagging is more pronounced.

(2) All tags used to describe an information are often shared publicly, and their distributions often appear in the long tail convergence shown in Fig. 1 (Shirky, C. 2005). Each tag and its frequency, can reflect the general public to the nature of the information broadly consistent definition, and not let the minority opinion (minority opinion) completely submerged.

Figure 1: Tag frequency distribution of two deli.cio.us bookmarks