Acidus wrote:
This article touches on a few of the more obvious issues with implementing a tagging system properly. Tom, Rattle and I have already scoped all the places in Memestreams that use the topic system and are discussing ways to replace it with a tagging system. Believe me, it is not an easy problem! Tagging by its very nature is more chaotic than a hierarchical topic system. Having a a good implementation is only half the battle: people must tag items well. A item that contains odd or tags that don't best describe the article is in danger of fading away. No one knows exactly what terms it could be filed under. This is where topics do very well. By imposing a controlled vocabulary, a searcher can presumably read the entire vocabulary to see all possible topic words they might be interested in. In a nutshell, here are some big problems with tags: -How to handle multiple words
-If/how to allow tag delimiter inside a tag
-Does letter case matter
-Punctuation and symbols
-Handling plural or singular words
-Date formating
-Multiple language support
-Colloquialisms/slang
It seems like what's missing is a tag dictionary which is able to group & graph relationships between words based on their actual definition. Such as being able to place in a hierarchy "Fruit" within the context of "plant" "apple" "leaf" in a way which would be relevant. It would be difficult to create such a dictionary, and to keep it modern might even be more difficult. If you look at something like Wiki-pedia(which has hyperlink style references to related topics and words which are connected to other words/topics), and you stripped out of that all of the back story and just kept the main topic and the words which are hyperlinked, organized these words in a treestyle hierarchy, and built a comparative reference based on common typos and variations, you might get close to the tool you're looking for. Such a task might seem nightmarish at first, but since there are much fewer words and phrases in existence than new ones every year, eventually the tool would become useful. RE: The Need for Creating Tag Standards | 
