Tag Sharing Use Cases
From TagCommons
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Note: The use cases are taken from a blog post, which summarized the results of working group discussions. It is now a living document, which can accommodate new use cases and refinements of already-identified use cases.
[edit] Use Case 1: Personal Bookmarking across tagging sites
Enable an application that can combine the tags from different content and tags sources -- such as the photo and the news site and any other bookmarking service -- so the user can manage tags across these sources. In short, the problem is to support various tagging goals (tasks, purposes) across disparate contexts (content sources, tagging tools, etc). The technical requirement is to overcome the fact that every site with tagging data is a silo with at best a proprietary API.
[edit] Use Case 2: Browsing and searching others' tag data across sources
Some tagging sites provide tools that nicely aggregate collective tagging data to tap into popular opinion, trends, and so forth. Again, the use case is a simple generalization of these browsing and searching services across tag data sources. For example, today you can find common tags used in blog categories on Technorati, but you can't easily merge them with similar collective tagging data on del.icio.us or flickr. This case has the same technical requirement as personal tagging, but applied to aggregate data: to be able to compare/connect/intersect tagging data across these sources -- without owning the sources.
This use case of aggregate tag data also can be viewed from different perspectives, depending on whether the data are about individual tag assertions or about group behavior or collections of tag facts. Collections of tags, in turn, may be filtered, sorted, or otherwise aggregated from individual tag: for example, the "top ten" tags on an object.
[edit] Use Case 3: Social Re-Search Using Tag Data
Use tag data from multiple sites to use the experience of other people's search and tag behavior to facilitate research on a topic. For instance, one could use the data of other people's tag assertions to give weight to associations between queries and target documents (improving signal to noise or relevance) and to expose the results of other people's research on a given topic (reusing their saved documents on a topic). This use case requires that there be some way for a service to meaningfully search, compare, and integrate tag data from multiple, independent applications. In particular, it drives the need to match multiple tag labels which might be used to tag the same concept, and to do this across sites which use different label matching schemes.
[edit] Use Case 4: Multimedia Cross Reference
If tagging data were available from multiple sources through a common mechanism, it would also be possible to prebuild a rich reference source of connections. Imagine looking at any web site containing a tagged item and seeing links to images, books, music, videos, games, or any other content that were similarly tagged. Today's "mashups" are built on point-to-point integrations between proprietary APIs, such as a maps API and a local information database. The same holds for mashups that use tags as the data to correlate information. Point-to-point integrations are inherently limited in scale, and tend to reinforce data hegemony. A public cross reference service would need to be agnostic about the sources over which it is generating links.
[edit] Use Case 5: Organizing Documents Using Tags
This use case generalizes the conventional idea of a tag of a web page using a web application to other information spaces and applications. In our enthusiasm for HTML and the Web, we often overlook how much information resides in document repositories. Makers of commercial document repositories, CAD systems, or open source systems such as source management systems could expose a tag data access mechanism that would enable add-on services. For example, a code module in an open source module could be tagged for the various purposes to which it has been applied, and others could then find it using the labels in that tagging. By opening up tagging across repositories of any kind of digital document, independent of the APIs of particular applications, the makers and users of document repositories could benefit from the value of collaborative tagging that we see in the Internet.
[edit] Use Case 6: Tag MetaSearch and MetaMonitoring
Already, there are dozens of tagging services, each offering a different slant on the basic collaborative bookmark. Like other players in the web ecosystem, they are finding niches and learning to compete. For example, a site called LibraryThing specializes in tagging books, and has shown that an independent tag space can compete with the large commercial interests that dominate the book distribution channels. Similarly, there is room for competition in the UI and search quality for tag-based search, as shown by RawSugar. On top of these services, this ecosystem will spawn a "metasearch" layer for searching and monitoring across such tagging services. Just as RSS readers monitor and aggregate multiple feeds, and metasearch engines crawl the deep web for things like travel deals, a tag metasearch service will allow users to place bets with their attention based on tags across various tagging services. If the tagging data can be exposed consistently by these tagging services, then the meta sites will be able to offer a more powerful and meaningful service to their users.
[edit] Use Case 7: Social Research on Collective Intelligence
As user contributed content on the Web has become a mainstream phenomenon, more and more people will be exposed to the concept of tagging. Their collective tagging activity offers an unprecedented opportunity to study how people learn from groups at different scales, how they use language, how social trends emerge and evolve, and many other research topics. An open mechanism for getting this data, and a mechanism that encourages meaningful comparisons across a wide variety of sources, would be an extremely valuable resource for this area of research.
[edit] Use Case 8: Distributing tagged information to the Semantic Web
The vision of the Semantic Web is to allow powerful computation over the structured data that runs through the unstructured content on the Web. The Semantic Web has a standards-based set of mechanisms for data sharing, including, notably, ontologies for expressing agreements on meaning and a tuple-based format for exposing data called RDF. Tag data can be viewed as a kind of structured data (at the very simplest, tuples relating people, labels, and objects), and some of the more interesting scenarios of tag data integration would involve automated reasoning over these tuples. For example, to find other people who share your interest in some topic, you might ask a service that can find tags which are related to your topic, sources of tagging data mentioning those tags, and people associated with those tag assertions in those sources. Sophisticated reasoning could be employed to decide, for instance, whether two users on different sites are the same person, or that two uses of the same tag label are about the same concept or word sense. The technical requirements for tagging systems to participate in the Semantic Web include the need to define a ontology of tagging data that could be used across the variety of tagging systems which could participate. An excellent example of this is the Revyu.com site, which is a user review site with tagging that exposes its tag data using a tag ontology and exposes its data in RDF.
