Library clips

This is a shout out to all!

I’m wanting to find out if there are any enterprise folksonomy packages…all the social bookmark managers I’ve used are web-based.

Basically we want a social bookmark manager installed on our server and restricted to our staff…also something we can customise to suit our Intranet.

I’m aware a few bookmark managers allow you to create groups, and I know we can make Furl private and everyone can share the log-in, but we want to customise (put a our logo) and have the security (even though I know Furl will always be around) by installing it on our server.

Even better, is there a system where everyone has their own account, contributing to the folksonomy (homepage), but the contributors are only the staff at our company?

Instead of being for the whole web contributing to the folksonomy, it is just restricted to our staff.

I would test it out on just one business unit, if it worked fine, then we could maybe make groups within the folksonomy, for all the business units.

In comparison

Web

• Contributors - anyone with an account
• Groups - anyone with an account that is in a group

Enterprise

• Contributors - restricted to staff
• Groups - business units

So the master home page would have the aggregated folksonomy of all the business units (groups)

The business units (groups) would have their own home page (folksonomy)

Also able to browse tag clouds by group or all groups together in one giant cloud…as well as browse a tag set.

Search

• full-text
• title field
• tag field
• within a group
• within whole folksonomy

Even better would be to enable bookmarking of other file types, such as doc, xls, pdf, etc..

Once the system is up and running, I will see how the tags pan out (educating people on tag ettiquette…and moderating the tags by fixing mistakes, plurals, synonyms, acronyms…then re-educating people about these moderations, eg. please use New York and not NY)

…maybe we could make the system smart, so if someone types in NY a prompt will come up saying please use New York (this would be kind of like a synonym ring or rule set)

Now that takes care of appropriate tags when bookmarking, what about when browsing.

Well if someone types in NY, the result should be empty, but there should be a note that reads, please use New York.

After a while we can see how well the emerging vocabulary evolves, and if we need to turn it into some sort of hybrid system where some tags are not allowed (please choose another tag from this list or suggest a tag to the administrator)…and if namespaces or a a type of taxonomy is required.

The following comments on this post are very insightful.

Here is an excerpt of one comment:

“…I predict that these concepts will continue to grow in popularity because people want to organize information. However, they will paint themselves into a corner and the only way out is through the transformation of tagging schemes into ontologies. Don’t get me wrong - I think these early tagging systems are useful because they will educate us to the requirements beyond the near horizon and just how low the ceiling is for emergent (taxonomy-based) tagging.

As such, I predict that from a broad and divergent set of terms will emerge groups that create ontological overlays (see XTM 1.0) of agreed-open definitions. I suspect these groups will form around a domain of expertise and a desire to eliminate chaos created by ground-up taxonomies. This scenario requires the availability of tagging API’s that allow a higher-order architecture to emerge.”

Also this post speculates on the processes.

An excerpt from the post:

“…could tag new and existing content in an unrestricted manner for a set period of time. At the cut-off point, the tags would be analysed for popularity and similarity (synonyms, misspellings etc.), and a reduced set then used for an open (card) sort. The results of this could be analysed and transferred into a first iteration of a taxonomy, along set rules.
The taxonomy could then be exposed to the search engine and CMS - authors would now tag their content using the taxonomy, and, for ongoing maintenance would still have the option for creating a new tag. New tags could be processed by the taxonmomist and added/amended to the overall classification as necessary. I’m not sure whether this would work in practice, but it might be the outline of using rapid, distributed categorisation to move to a stable classification, and it would certainly reflect a consensus opinion…”

Now if there was a system I could start trialing!