Let's try again.
Shelley Powers has written a good summary of some arguments about the relative merits of tagging and more formal metadata. Nice pics, too.
Shelley is worried that the rise of "cheap" metadata, in particular tags, will inhibit development of tools to make "real" metadata available to the masses.
Theory: the value of terms in any metadata system used in an uncontrolled way tends to zero with time.
That's just as true for rich, formal so-called “ontologies” as it is for tag soup. There is a difference, however. Tags don't lie about their status. We know, right off, that they're just terms which people have attached to things, for some reason. We know that we don't know what sense the term is meant in, of the undoubtedly many possible. We know that we don't know the intention of the tagger in tagging. The spam problem arises from this: spammers are applying tags in order that pictures show up in certain places, not because they think those tags are relevant. The business of tagging flickr photos with the "offensive" tag is another case in point, where the intention is now to stop items showing up in certain places, and really has nothing to do with offensiveness.
Problematic, perhaps, but not unique to tagging. Exactly the same is true of uncontrolled use of any classification system, however good the tools are which provide access to it. Things will be tagged in a way which is inconsistent with the intended use of any system, either through ignorance or intent.
The rel="nofollow" tag which Google has announced it will use to control the inclusion of links in its PageRank calculations is indeed a nice demonstrator of an important point here. It's meaning is very well defined: it is grounded not in human understanding, but in machine behaviour. Nofollow can't be spammed: either Google honours it, or they don't. The web now has a mechanism for systematically witholding page rank. What it does with it is out of Google's control.
Point is, that some terms have meaning in this, mechanical way, like those which make up a programming language. Others have meaning in a fluid, human way. The latter will always be as fluid as they are human; no fancy tools will change that.
Fancy tools to make use of formal taxonomies easier would be great, of course. Very useful for those who care enough to put in the effort to understand, and make sure they stick to, the formal intended meanings of terms. But however easy that is made, it will always be hard, and people will always get it wrong. And as people get it wrong, the extensional definition of the term becomes less precise, and the value of the term tends to zero. You might slow the process down, but you can't, simply can't, stop it.
And, of course, because the effort involved in understanding and carefully applying the terms of a formal taxonomy is relatively high — independently of tools, which can reduce the accidental difficulties but cannot attack the essence — it is just not useful in the sort of "fire and forget" systems like del.icio.us, where any effort is too much.
In the comments to Shelley's post, Nick Sweeney writes:
I’m a bit of a Saussurean about this, in that I think that taxonomy (or ontology, depending upon your disciplinary point of origin) is crystallised/calcified folksonomy. Authorised folksonomy, if you like.
Right on! Those two terms, “crystallised” and “calcified” are a really useful duo. The one has connotations of order, beauty, and value. The other of dull rigidity. Well designed formal taxonomies have the first of those in abundance. Both have the second, and you can't avoid it. A taxonomy can only ever be an encoding of one incomplete and imperfect view of the world.
Shelley:
I agree with Clay that the semantic web is going to be built ‘by the people’, but it won’t be built on chaos. In other words, 100 monkeys typing long enough will NOT write Shakespeare; nor will a 100 million people randomly forming associations create the semantic web.
100 monkeys indeed will not write Shakespeare, but 100 Shakespeares didn't write Shakespeare either. Shakespeare did. The situation we have is that of 100 million people (or, at any rate, some large and growing number) who need tools to organise stuff, and to help them find stuff. 100 million people who will go right on randomly forming associations, whether the results pretend to be anything other than randomly formed associations or not.
We're dealing here not with the formal space of so-called ontologies and logic, but with the messy, human space of language and meaning. The processes involved are, essentially social. Tools which deny this will fail.
Shelley:
Clay believes that ultimately ontologies will fall to folkonomies, as the latter gain rapid acceptance because of their low cost and ease of use; I believe that ultimately interest in folksonomies will go the way of most memes, in that they’re fun to play with, but eventually we want something that won’t splinter, crack, and stumble the very first day it’s released.
When you design a building to ride out earthquakes with minimal damage, you build in flexibility. Of course, the clever part is in deciding where and how to build in that flexibility. Tagging provids an abundance of flexibility, so much that the building can barely stand up.
But in some ways it works. Delicious is already very useful, on an individual basis, and has some use at a social scale. I follow what other people post about Lisp, Scheme, and Smalltalk for example. These are well defined terms, referring to programming languages rather than highly ambiguous and mis- or differently interpretable concepts. With less well defined concepts, the problems lie as much in the nature of the concepts as in the tagging approach.
Simply aggregating tags a la Technorati as it stands doesn't show a great deal of promise, but it is possible to envisage tools which show tag clouds and, by presenting these to the user, encourage convergence around particular tags. The results will never be complete, never perfect, but always changing, and sometimes useful.
When you have a Web-load of people, things happen from the bottom up. That's the way the Web works.
We've had no hot water for a while. It took us some time to get round to contacting the letting agent about it -- the shower is electric, which made it less than essential, and we kept forgetting to call during the day. They had someone round here minutes after I spoke to them today, which is better service than I was expecting (credit where it's due) since we're still waiting for them to fulfill promises made before we moved in.
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