Semantic Technology 2009: Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy and Folksonomy

1.Hybrid Approaches toTaxonomy & Folksonomy Semantic Technology 2009 San Jose, CA June 17, 2009Richard Beatch Paul Wlodarczyk Earley & Associates www.earley.com

2. Agenda

The taxonomy/folksonomy debate

Tagging pitfalls

Social tagging & the enterprise

Hybrid approaches to taxonomy/folksonomy

Co-existence

Tag-influenced taxonomy

Taxonomy-influenced tags

Tag hierarchies/ontologies

Conclusion

Founded in 1994, Earley & Associates is an information management (IM) consulting company specializing in

Taxonomy development and management

Content management strategy

Search integration

Usability & Information Architecture

Some of our recent clients include:

American Greetings, Hasbro, Ford Foundation, Astra Zeneca, Motorola, The Hartford Insurance Group, Urban Land Institute

Give us your business card

For a free pass to one of our Community of Practice conference calls

Richard Beatch

Senior Consultant at Earley & Associates, Inc.

Ph.D. in Ontology

Specialized in Taxonomy, Search, Metadata, and content architecture.

Extensive industry experience leading the implementation and design of taxonomies and search solutions for a range of companies including Apple, McAfee, Allstate, Dell, and AT&T.

Blog: http://sethearley.wordpress.com/

Paul Wlodarczyk

Director, Solutions Consulting at Earley & Associates, Inc.

MBA with BA in Psychology / Cognitive Science

Specialized in unstructured content technologies with over 20 years experience in XML / structured authoring, content reuse, ECM, KM, localization, semantic analysis and content enrichment

Blogs at http://sethearley.wordpress.com/ and http://thecontentguy.net

Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 6. The tired debate Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved Taxonomy Folksonomy Control Democracy Top-down Bottom-up Arduous process Just do it Accurate Good enough Restrictive Flexible Static Evolving Expensive to maintain Low cost crowdsourced 7. The relevance problem

Search results should be relevant to what a searcher wants, but technology can only determine if it is relevant to a search term*

Taxonomies and folksonomies = 2 approaches to the problem of relevance with common goal of describing content, each with particular gaps

*Billy Cripe: Folksonomy, Keywords & Tags: Social & Democratic User Interaction in Enterprise Content Management http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/content-management/pdf/OracleSocialTaggingWhitePaper.pdf Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 8. Taxonomy

Added by a small number of individuals: author/originators or authorized persons (e.g.librarian)

Describes meaning or purpose of content based on a set view point for a specific audience using a controlled vocabulary

Relationships between terms defined

Hierarchical (e.g. Computer hardware > Keyboard)

Associative (e.g. Computer hardware Software)

Equivalent (e.g. Laptop = Notebook Computer)

Added by authors and consumers (individual motivation)

Can connote any type of meaning or purpose

No compression around a single viewpoint, no control of vocabulary

Self-correcting through volume

Adding individual value to the act of classification user control over findability

Reducing the cognitive burden(i.e. its easy)

Reduced technologicalinvestment (i.e. its cheap)

Can leverage emergentstructure (folksonomy)

Neither tags nor taggers are perfect

No language control

Guy & Tonkin, 2006.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html

Study: 40% of flickr tags and 28% of del.icio.us tags were flawed in these ways Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved Misspellings Library vs. libary Plam pilot Compound words TimBernersLee Case & number Folksonomy, Folksonomies Personal tags To read My dog @work Single-use tags Billybobsdog 12. The downside

Varying levels of granularity

Same tag, different meanings

Lack of relationships between tags which is broader? Narrower?

Lack of consistency/approach to change even single user can change language and hamper own personal retrieval

Most tag search does not account for stemming, plurals, etc.

E.g. Search on Delicious: Folksonomy: 16049 Folksonomies: 4404 Both: 2642 Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 14. The tagging hype cycle http://www.pui.ch/phred/archives/2007/05/tag-history-and-gartners-hype-cycles.html Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 15. The web vs. the enterprise

Shirky: there is no shelf

Traditional organization schemes are built to deal with physical collections and constraints.

They dont work well on the web

large corpus

no clear edges

no formal categories

no authority

The enterprise is much more defined

smaller corpuses

formal entities

coordinated users, clear tasks

need for reliable retrieval

E.g. Flickr Delicious Social tagging works well in this context Social tagging is more of a challenge, needs clear arena Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 16. R o le of folksonomy in the enterprise?

Tagging external links

Seeing what colleagues are interested in

Sharing links with a specific team

Subscribing to link feeds

Monitoring news/blog coverage of the company

Consumer/competitor research

Tracking industry trends

Tagging internal links

Finding/facilitating access to most popular pages on the intranet

Seeing what intranet pages mean to staff

Social aspects

Identifying subject matter experts

Connecting people who share interests

Encouraging collaboration & resource sharing

Improve your taxonomy, information retrieval

User tagging to refine the corporate taxonomy

New concepts

New terminology

Seeing what employees find interesting

Distributing tagging tasks

Potential issues of security, inappropriateness

Can implement some level of vetting

Privacy concerns

Can be anonymous tagging, although this removes some social value

Can create role or team-based collections

Need higher ratio of active participants due to population size

Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 19. Message text External News Reports Discussion postings Links Engineering document repositories Success Stories Policies Approved Methods Best Practices Key concept:Not all content is created equally The content continuum Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved Lower Cost Higher Cost Tagging/Organizing Processes Unfiltered Reviewed/Vetted/Approved Lower Value Higher Value 20. What if we blended the two?

Folksonomy / Taxonomy

Low cost Findability Flexible Structured relationships User terminology Oversight Social sharing Consistency Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 21. Hybrid approaches Co-existence Tag-influenced taxonomy Taxonomy-influenced tagging Tag hierarchies/ontologies Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 22. Co-existence

Taxonomy and folksonomy are used side by side

Strengths of each approach preserved, philosophy of each kept pure

Web example: Flickr & Library of Congress:http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/ Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 23. Co-existence Ann Arbor District Library Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 24. Raytheon corporate example

Used in Raytheon employee portal - website lists (Suggested sites feature box)

How does it work:

inserted Suggested Sites in a "feature" box to the right of the regularly ranked results

website suggestions (URLs) submitted along with recommended tags/keywords which are subsequently verified and approved by librarians

Vetting & editing tags

Weeds out potentially inappropriate tags

Eliminates misspellings, plural issues, etc.

Some can be done automatically (spell-checker, e.g.)

Enhances findability

Higher effort/cost

Perceived lack of trust

Who knows better?

Taxonomy & tagging co-exist, tags serve as pool of candidate terms to enrich taxonomy, keep it current

Find new terminology (synonyms, popular language)

Find new concepts

Performed as separateprocesses (taxonomytagging=formal,tagging=informal) orcombined in singleinterface

Requires formal vetting process

Can be supported by automation (e.g. candidate tags pulled & filtered with script to remove taxonomy terms, stop words)

Evaluate candidates based on

Frequency (literary warrant)

Salience within context

Look at tags used in conjunction with taxonomy

Presenting choices/suggestions to user from controlled set ofterms/tags

Sometimes users prefer easy choice

Drop-down menus

Check boxes

Type ahead

Tree view

influenced option to enter own tag? Good source of new terms

Enforces consistency

Offers structure

Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 29. WWW example: ZigTag Defined Tagging Definitions from Wikipedia & Wordnet Tagging with type-ahead against database of 3M unique concepts & 8M synonyms Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 30. Zigtag

Type ahead & synonyms encourage consistency

Users can enter new tags

Synonyms based on Wikipedia, so can be dirty data

No hierarchy, only equivalent relationships so far

Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 31. Zigtag search Still get problems with uncontrolled tags & recall Interesting relationships from Wikipedia Browse-able tag cloud Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 32. Example: myedna (Education.au) http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/papers/tagging_hayman.ppt Fully taxonomy-directed tagging Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 33. TextWise Semantic Cloud

Document (URL or text) is submitted to web service for semantic analysis

Category tags from subset of the ODP taxonomy

Concept tags are derived from document, persisted, related to ODP categories

Review site: tags are controlled not against a taxonomy, but against other tags reduces redundancy

Only popular tags exposed as faceted navigation

Plug-ins make taxonomy easy

Present the taxonomy like tags

E.g. KWizCom: plug-in manages taxonomy and tags in easy interface can opt-out of letting users create own tags

More consistency

Better support for findability

Relationships, definitions leveragedadding meaning to the tags

Realistic for the enterprise

Not really folksonomy anymore..

Can be forcing terminology on user

Need to develop reference list of concepts manually through taxonomy or need large corpus to derive automatically

Tag hierarchies come in two flavors:

User-powered

Automatic derivation

User-powered

Social approach

Bogus hierarchies possible

Small population will contribute

RawSugar tried it

(no longer around)

Taggers could specify hierarchy in own account, tags clustered based on common groups

E.g. LibraryThing

LibraryThing allows any use to combine (or uncombine) 2 tags that are semantically equivalent. www.librarything.com Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 40. User-poweredtag hierarchies: Intelligent tags

Move toward more semantic tagging with machine-readable tags, e.g. Flickrmachine tagsin triple format: [namespace]:[key]=[value]

geo:neighborhood=SoHo, geo:lat=58.41618, etc.

flickr:user=mortimer

taxonomy:common=grevyszebra

lastfm:event=34640

makes your photo appear on a lastfm event page

MOAT: Meaning of a tag part of linked data movement, mapping tags to semantic web

http://moat-project.org/

Adding to the triplet

User resource tag meaning

Meaning = URI to a resource containing meaning (e.g. DBPedia)

Tag hierarchies, facets, ontologies, or folksontology

Done through statistical/clustering algorithms

http://www.pui.ch/phred/automated_tag_clustering/ Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 43. Delicious & citeulike hiearchy http://heymann.stanford.edu/taghierarchy.html Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 44. Clustering at flickr Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 45. Auto clustering/facets

Still not very mature

Time-sensitive

Community- sensitive

Ambiguous tags

Improve with volume(self-correcting)

Relationships, definitionsleveragedadding meaning to the tags

Provides a basis for application behavior in the absence of taxonomy (e.g. Flickr maps, clusters)

Self-correcting with volume

Automatically derived relationships (clusters) can be bogus or time-sensitive

Folksonomic relationships can be esoteric (just like tags)

Small population of contributors

Not all content is created equal tags and taxonomies have their sweet spots

Hybrid approaches are emerging

taxonomy-influenced tagging leading the pack in popularity on the web

co-existence in the enterprise

Look for more developments on the semantic web/linked data front for making tags more intelligent

Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 48. Questions? Richard Beatch[email_address] Paul Wlodarczyk [email_address] Web :www.earley.com Blog : sethearley.wordpress.com Twitter :earleytaxonomy Give us your business card for a free pass to one of our Community of Practice conference calls (a $50 value). 49. Appendix: Corporate social tagging tools 50. Corporate social tagging software http://www.connectbeam.com/ Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 51. Corporate social tagging software http://www.cogenz.com/ Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 52. Corporate social tagging software http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/connections/dogear.html Copyright 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved 53. Corporate social tagging software

BEA AquaLogic Pathways

http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=index.jsp&FP=/content/products/aqualogic/pathways/

http://www.newsgator.com/business/socialsites/default.aspx

Semantic Technology 2009: Hybrid Approaches to Taxonomy and Folksonomy

Technology

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