PUBLIC MARKS with tags semtags & folksonomy

Tags have taken the internet by storm. Where once the question was “what are they,” now all people want to know is whether a given site offers them. But what are the actual benefits of tags? What motivates millions of Flickr, del.icio.us and blog users to add tags to their photos and posts? And what is it about tags and tagging that gets information architects and user experience professionals so excited?

Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by formal terms used in data that they might generate or consume. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the social web. They are created as people associate terms with content that they generate or consume. Recently the two ideas have been put into opposition, as if they were right and left poles of a political spectrum. This piece is an attempt to shed some cool light on the subject, and to preview some new work that applies the two ideas together to enable an Internet ecology for folksonomies.