Musings over the Implications of Tagging for Research, aka Social Bookmarking

Below is my out-loud thinking during an e-mail with one of the Assistant Directors here at CTLT that focused on folksonomy

Cleaned-up a bit:

An interesting thesis might be to gauge how tags help researchers branch into cross-disciplinary domains. For example, I hypothesize: as more people start actively tagging content, and as people start using tags to find interrelated information, more people will start coming across tags that connect to seemingly unrelated information. In this sense a researcher could essentially begin to traverse a vast amount of content that is now linked, but in more traditional domains of academia would be considered disconnected and unrelated. I would think that these newly identified connections might open up researchers to new ways of viewing their research domain, as well as provide opportunities for more interdisciplinary study.

This also prompted an investigation into the idea of community based ontology.

Now, one might ask, "How did you go from tagging and the growth of interdisciplinary research to thinking about community ontology?"

Well, community, because I started thinking of how social bookmarking/tagging might be useful in a system focused on environmental monitoring and collaborative planning. And ontology, because that is what we are thinking about when trying to define some piece of information and its relationships.

Anyway, I came across this very simple and yet useful slide show.