Tagging and Subject Headings

I just returned from our faculty lounge on campus where I was in a discussion with one of our librarians and a management faculty.  Over the past few months I have been trying to convince my colleague in the management department to consider tagging his content rather than using directory structures.  I was trying to explain the tagging concept comparing it to the subject search function in the library catalog for associating content with subject areas using keywords.

Our librarian interjected to point out the issue of inconsistencies in the tagging approach as opposed to the standardized subject categories used by the library.  Tagging results in inconsistent tags applied to the same subject whereas the subject categories are centrally applied an therefore consistent across information sources.  We all agreed the subject categories certainly provide more value for their consistency but, as I argued, we cannot centrally categorize all content due to the large volumes of content now generated on the internet.

We must understand tagging is not precise but is intended to support searching of large quantities of content.  Searching using user-defined tags will result in imprecise results as opposed to subject searches.  It is not practical to apply official subject headings on our content so we are left with user-defined tagging.  Commonality in tags across content authors will emerge and become a type of standard where searching for a particular tag yields significant results.  However, these results will not represent the entire set of content related to the subject since some content authors did not apply the same tag; the search results are not complete and some content will not be found.

While limitations exist in the tagging approach, content authors applying a formalized taxonomy to the content is not yet practical.  We will have to continue to wait for Web 3.0 (the semantic web).