1. Strategies LLC Taxonomy February 21, 2007Copyright 2007 Taxonomy Strategies LLC. All rights reserved. Tagging: It’s the Interface Stupid!

2. 2 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Who I am v Over 25 years in the business of organized information  Founder & Principal, Taxonomy Strategies  Director, Solutions Architecture, Interwoven  VP, Infoware, Metacode Technologies  Program Manager, Getty Foundation  Manager, Pricewaterhouse  Assistant Director for Technical Services, Hampshire College  Chief, Technical Services, Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison v Metadata & taxonomies community leadership.  President, American Society for Information Science & Technology  Trustee, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative  Co-Founder, Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services  Adviser, National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board  Reviewer, National Science Foundation Division of Information and Intelligent Systems

3. 3 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Recent & current projects Government v Chelan County Public Utilities District v Commodity Futures Trading Commission v Federal Aviation Administration v Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta v Head Start v Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (http://mysearch.internet.gov.sg/)http://mysearch.internet.gov.sg/ v NASA (nasataxonomy.jpl.nasa.gov)nasataxonomy.jpl.nasa.gov v U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency v U.S.D.A. Economic Research Service v U.S.D.A. e-Government Program (www.usda.gov)www.usda.gov v U.S. Dept of Education ERIC v U.S. D.H.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services v U.S. Environmental Protection Agency v U.S. Forest Service v U.S. GSA Office of Citizen Services (www.usa.gov)www.usa.gov v U.S. Small Business Administration v U.S. Social Security Administration Commercial v Agency.com v Amway v Albertsons v Allstate Insurance v Baker Hughes v BHP Billiton v Blue Shield of California v Campbell Soup Company v Capital One v Debevoise & Plimpton v Dell v Halliburton v Hewlett Packard v Microsoft v Motorola v Oracle v PeopleSoft v Pricewaterhouse Coopers v Siderean Software v Sprint v Time Inc. NGO’s v Dewy Decimal Classification v European Committee for Standardization v IDEAlliance v International Monetary Fund v National Association of Realtors v OCLC

4. 4 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information What I do Organize Stuff

5. 5 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information For us, taxonomy work includes: v Metadata Scheme. Data fields for describing content so that it can be found and used. v Vocabularies. Collections of terms that are used to specify some of the metadata properties.  Relationships between content, fields or terms (hierarchical, equivalence, & associative)  Some vocabularies are big & hierarchical, some are small and flat. v Application Profile. Formal representation of metadata & vocabularies.

6. 6 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Agenda v Content Tagging v Tagging Interface

7. 7 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Tagging Overview v Tagging is better than the words that happen to occur in a piece of content. v All tagging is useful  End user tagging  Tagging by librarians  Automated tagging by OS and algorithms v Content should be tagged throughout its lifecycle, each time the content is handled and used so that it accrues value or its significance is diminished.

8. 8 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information MS Office: File  Properties How many people fill this in?

9. 9 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Organize How many people click on this?

10. 10 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information What is social tagging? v End user tagging v Easy, intuitive tagging interfaces v Almost instantaneous feedback  Enables people to tag & re-tag content  … in response to seeing their tags in context with other tags. v Emergent categories  Resembles open card sort process in which patterns emerge  … rather than validating categories using closed card sorts.

11. 11 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Social tagging innovators v flickr founders  Caterina Fake  Stewart Butterfield v del.icio.us founder  Joshua Schachter v del.icio.us & flickr are now both part of Yahoo! v As of April 2006 flickr had 130 million photos posted by 3 million registered users.

12. 12 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Four tagging rules for end users RuleDescription Use specific terms Apply the most specific terms when tagging content. Specific terms can always be generalized, but generic terms cannot be specialized. Use multiple terms Use as many terms as necessary to describe What the content is about & Why it is important. Use appropriate terms Only fill-in the facets & values that make sense. Not all facets apply to all content. Consider how content will be used Anticipate how the content will be searched for in the future, & how to make it easy to find it. Remember that search engines can only operate on explicit information.

13. 13 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Agenda v Content Tagging v Tagging Interface

14. 14 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Requirements for a tagging interface v Automated form fill-in (automatically fills in known data) v Tagging precedents (see tags already assigned by others) v Controlled vocabularies, e.g., with pull-down list v Multi-valued tags v Geo-tagging v Group tagging v Clean-up tag tools, e.g., alpha list v Batch editing v Share/Don’t share (Public/Private) v Identified owner (who can be emailed) v Almost immediate feedback, e.g., tag cloud

15. 15 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Form fill-in: Automatically filled-in known data

16. 16 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Form fill-in: Automatically filled-in known data Manual form fill-in w/ check boxes, pull-down lists, etc. Auto keyword & summarization

17. 17 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Form fill-in: Automatically filled-in known data Auto-categorization Parse & lookup (recognize names) Rules & pattern matching

18. 18 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Tagging precedents: See tags assigned by others

19. 19 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Multi-valued group tagging

20. 20 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Group geo-tagging

21. 21 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Group geo-tagging

22. 22 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Clean up tag tools: Alpha list

23. 23 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Batch edit

24. 24 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Share or don’t share tagging

25. 25 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Bulk tagging v ID collection of related content items by pattern or context v Then, apply same attributes to all content items

26. 26 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Tag a folder v Drag & drop content items into folder v Then, content items inherit properties of folder

27. 27 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Workflow v Approve & improve mindset Review & Improve Add Metadata Create Content Publish

28. 28 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Interactive rewards v Almost instantaneous exposure of tags in simple user interfaces on the web provides positive reinforcement for user tagging that simply did not exist before. v For example,  Most popular  Tag clouds  Alerts

29. 29 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Most popular  Another example is most emailed from, e.g., the NY Times.

30. 30 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Tag cloud

31. 31 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Alerts v New (content selected by date) v Subscriptions (content selected by tags) v Interest (content selected by other people) v Individual (content selected for you by other people)

32. Strategies LLC Taxonomy February 21, 2007Copyright 2007 Taxonomy Strategies LLC. All rights reserved. Is faceted indexing the future of social tagging?

33. 33 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Summary v There are lessons to be learned from web tagging about how to get good metadata in document and content management applications. v Document and content management system tagging must be simple, and it must be almost instantaneously easier to find relevant work products.

34. Strategies LLC Taxonomy February 21, 2007Copyright 2007 Taxonomy Strategies LLC. All rights reserved. Questions? Joseph A. Busch 415-377-7912 jbusch@taxonomystrategies.com jbusch@taxonomystrategies.com

35. 35 Taxonomy Strategies LLC The business of organized information Tagging Overview v Tagging, any kind of tagging is better than the words that happen to occur in a piece of content. End user tagging is useful, so is tagging by librarians, as are tags automatically assigned by operating systems and language processing algorithms. Content should be tagged throughout its lifecycle, each time the content is handled and used so that it accrues value or its significance is diminished. v Almost instantaneous exposure of tags in simple user interfaces on the web provides positive reinforcement for user tagging that simply did not exist before. It should not be surprising that a good user interface improves usability. v As content users flock to websites that help to organize the content on the web, advertisements and value added content services follow. The bottleneck in the semantic web has been not enough tagged content. The end user tagging revolution may begin to address this shortcoming. v There are lessons to be learned from web tagging about how to get good metadata in document and content management applications. Document and content management system tagging must be simple, and it must be almost instantaneously easier to find relevant work products.