Tag Gardening

Tag Gardening for Folksonomy Enrichment and Maintenance by Isabella Peters and Katrin Weller. This article really helped to clarify what Folksonomies are and I really loved the gardening analogy used through out. The weeding process within Tag Gardening is really important because when tags are misspelled or inappropriate it becomes difficult to link the content to similar content within the community. The need for specific tags is the equivalent to a Boolean search on google so that we get more specific search results instead of a large list of search results. By linking synonyms and pulling homonyms apart into their own categories it helps to create trails within the tagging world to follow. It may be difficult to control the tags that people use but with any new gain their can also be a few losses. But I feel that the gardening techniques used in this article give use the opportunity to improve our tags. Power Tags are like the main subject heading that encompasses the use of the other tags within a persons tagging personomy. So if I have a tag about dogs then others about certain types of dogs then dogs would be the power tag and the types of dogs would be the subfield.  Newer programs are giving our personomy a chance to be used across various platforms.  TagCare imports all of our own tags so that they can be used elsewhere it will also let us know if we are using certain tags to often meaning that those tags have become to broad and should be changed.  So in a way the TagCare program is helping with part of the Tag Gardening process.  But it is up to us as users to keep the "flowers" healthy and organized through the gardening process.