Tagging redefined with ‘CommonTag’
When the concept of tags was first borne, it was only tailored towards categorizing content so as to ease searching and browsing related content. Tags also became a social tool allowing a user to share content with another user. Visualization tools over tags such as tag clouds helped anyone to find out the most accessed content on any given site.
Sometime back Microsoft came up with the concept of ‘Smart Tags’. A ‘Smart Tag’ is more than a hyperlink on a page. Whenever the cursor hovers over a word identified as a ‘Smart Tag’ a drop down list appears with selection of links related to the word. Though unique the concept suffered adoption because the website developers were apprehensive about Microsoft’s control over web content since the words and associated links are selected by Microsoft.
On any social site, tags remain practically as a tool to allow users to browse related content within the same site but not outside of it. With Linked data, the web is geared towards a new era where data from multiple sources are linked together. A similar concept has developed along the thoughts of linking data and is called ‘Common Tag’. Unlike free-text tags which are constrained within a single site, Common Tags span over the entire web and refer to content which is unique and well defined. Since Common Tags are complete with meta data and URLs, they are defined using RDF, a standard format for expressing structured data within HTML. What does it mean for us then? With ‘Common Tags’ we could not only identify the concepts from our content but also any external content and organize them in a better way.
The ‘Common Tag’ format is jointly developed by Adaptive Blue, DERI, Yahoo, Faviki, Freebase, Zemanta and Zigtag. The companies provide services for users to get started with publishing content using ‘Common Tags’. For example, Zemanta provides a Firefox addon which identifies potential content that can serve as ‘Common Tag’ when you start editing. This holds good from writing emails to editing content on a blog. A quick start guide is also available from the ‘Common Tag’ project site. The project page also lists the current applications that support the ‘Common Tag’ format.
What is interesting in all of these is the shift in the social paradigm. Clearly the focus is now in unifying the whole web content rather than a single site.
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