Web 2.0 Architectures

The Collaborative Tagging Pattern

Also Known As

Terms and patterns associated with the Collaborative Tagging pattern include:

Folksonomy

Folksonomy is a popular term used to capture part of this pattern (as documented in the O’Reilly Radar report Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices. There are multiple definitions of folksonomy; however, the one given in the O’Reilly Radar publication is closest to this pattern.

The Semantic Web Grounding pattern

We discuss the related pattern of Semantic Web Grounding later in this chapter. Such a pattern may use a collaborative tagging system as the basis for tagging resources; however, it may be implemented without this pattern.

The Declarative Living and Tag Gardening pattern

The Declarative Living and Tag Gardening pattern, which we discuss in the next section, is also highly relevant to this pattern.

Business Problem (Story)

Often, we need to use a search system to find resources on the Internet. The resources must match our needs, and to find relevant information, we need to enter search terms. The search system compares those terms with a metadata index that shows which resources might be relevant to our search.

The primary problem with such a system is that the metadata index is often built based on resources being tagged by a small group of people who determine the relevancy of those resources for specific terms. The smaller the group that does this is, the greater the chance is that the group will apply inaccurate tags to some resources or omit ...