Contextual tag clouds

I had an interesting idea at the last project meeting, while we were discussing Elizabeth’s latent semantic analysis work. She came up with the idea of being able to browse semantically related items, like you do on a library shelf. The user enters a search query and the results are a group of items that are linked in the same way that books on a library bookshelf are linked. This groups the search results according to their semantic or contextual relationship rather than by ranking algorithms. It also extends the result set beyond those that contain the search term. The idea is then to present this as a visual net.

 

Anyway this got me thinking about metadata keywords (part of LOM) as being similar to tags used for describing objects or text entries on social networking applications. Tags are often represented as tag clouds (group of words), where the frequency of the tag’s use is indicated by the size or colour of the tag words. As the applications collection gets bigger the number of tags and the space used for a tag cloud does as well. This was one of the things I found visually unsatisfying with my experimental use of del.icio.us. So I was thinking this would be a good place to apply latent semantic analysis. Tags could then be weighted according to their semantic relationship and form smaller more manageable groups. How this works from the user perspective I’m not so sure yet. But I think there’s something in this so will think on.

 

Tagging

Spurned on by the tagging bug (although I still have yet to use the links they’re all nicely sorted) I bought two interesting books this week. I think they will be useful background to the social networking and personal organisation aspects of the project. Ok the books:

• Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web by Gene Smith (2008)
• Wikipatterns: by Stewart Mader (2008)

I’ve read most of the former and the latter I will leave for a later post. The book is light weight and easy to read presenting the concept in a variety of scenarios. Tagging is used to organise and relate all sorts of digital objects. Photos, links, files anything that resides on the internet or computer can be tagged. This is only restrained by the supporting system or tagging application. Not only do tags organise objects so they can be in many pigeonholes at once, they act as links form on hole to another related hole and within a community they act as a voting system. A way of communally defining an object as well as showing interest and suggesting that the thing is more important than those things you don’t bother to tag.

 

This got me thinking about metadata and whether it might become an obsolete technology. It’s designed in the same frame of mind as the Dewey system in some ways, aimed at experts to define objects in set and predefined way. This is certainly evident from the repositories

del.icio.us

I have been playing with del.icio.us for the last few days as part of looking into personal space applications. I am particularly interested in the social tagging aspect and the way people describe things, so I started with myself. Starting with my favourites list I uploaded them and began the process of tagging. Having never done this process before, I was surprised to find that I did use several labels for one item. I thought that my years of folder hierarchies might have dulled my imagination. I was fairly exited by this.

 

I also looked at the tags used by other people for some of the URL’s I had tagged. For example a link to Learning object metadata – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – I had tagged as e-learning, education, elearning, learningobjects metadata lom scorm all of which were in the most common tag cloud. Others had tagged this under standards, RDF, data, learning, semweb and xml. Some I agree with, others like RDF, data and leaning I don’t.

 

This was all very interesting but what I want to know now is will I use the site to access my URLs. I browsed the web for a bit, all research relatedJ and added some good links that I didn’t include in my browser favourites. Lets see if I go back to them. Do you use del.icio.us? How do you use it? How often do you use it? How would you tag the URL above?