Tagging evolved

January 10, 2008

I was having an interesting conversation with Joe Brinkman from the DotNetNuke project this evening, and he got to talking about the ’social networking’ focus in the next DNN release.  I had a small brainwave and suggested something to him, but the implications might be larger than I originally considered.

He mentioned that they’d be looking at providing the capability to ‘tag’ every piece of content in the system, instead of just a few item types which can be tagged currently in DNN.  Their focus will be on the business/enterprise aspect of tagging and the social features in DNN, and given this I suggested that the tags have timestamps associated with them.  When doing a search through tags (which itself often isn’t done - it’s just a blind SQL SELECT triggered from a REST URL), giving tags with older dates less weight in the final results will likely make sense.  You could even implement a cutoff.  If a document was tagged ‘vacationpolicy’ 6 years ago, it’s very likely it’s not the vacation policy you’re looking for today.

I realize that tagging isn’t the only way to categorize data, but it’s another piece of data which will need to be considered when searching.  Using that extra metadata about the tag should be a factor in search results.  Storing ‘who’ tagged something would also be useful for influencing search results, as my ‘friends’ (people in my department, or people with my interests, or whatever) who tag something as ‘foo’ should result in things they tagged as ‘foo’ being rated higher than items tagged ‘foo’ by people I don’t know, or actively dislike for some reason.

I have to imagine that sites like Flickr, which have built a huge collection of tag data, have much of this tag meta information on hand, and could easily use it to influence results.  Introducing new behaviour on public sites for something which is already expected behaviour might not on the cards anytime soon, but I have to imagine these sorts of filters and weighting structures will make their way in to tag search algorithms (if such things even exist right now - I bet they don’t yet).

What do you think?

Posted in Codemash, Development, Ideas, Search, Social, Web, opensource