« Tags and folksonomies. The engineering of meaning and philosophy »

1. « Tags and folksonomies. The engineering of meaning and philosophy » Alexandre Monnin Paris I Panthéon - Sorbonne

2. I. What is a tag ?

3. Tags have made their appearance in 2003 thanks to Joshua Schachter, the founder of Muxway and Delicious (formerly know as del.icio.us). • “(…) so far as I know, I invented tagging for labeling and recall of things."

4. A term ? A word ? A keyword ?

5. In the scientific literature, a tag is often considered implicitly or explicitly to be a word which refers (sometimes with difficulty) to a concept (Limpens & Gandon 2008).

6. Really ? Has a tag always a fixed (denotational) semantics ? How about these ? 

7. From my del.icio.us tagcloud

8. Another del.icio.us account

9. A close-up

10. Machine-tags on Flickr

11. Are all these « words » denoting concepts ? Are all these tags words at all ? No.

12. The tag itself A user A resource Tags are also understood according to a threefold schema

13. Access vs. Reference • The problem, to borrow a line from Patrick Hayes (in the context of discussions about the status of URIs) is that : « There are two distinct relationships between names and things. Reference is different from access. The architecture of the Web determines access, but has no direct influence on reference »

14. Access vs. Reference « It is important to distinguish two different relationships between a name and a thing. ‘accesses’, meaning that the name provides a causal pathway to the thing, mediated by the Web. ‘denotes’or ‘refers to’, meaning that the name is being used to mention the thing. »

15. I’m drawing on this distinction to provide a new understanding of tags : digital artifacts deprived of any intrinsic semantics (the labels themselves, what I call in French the “libellé”, may of course have a semantic value though).

16. Tag Label (Chain of characters) Label (Material) User Relation of access Symbolic relation Resource

17. II. MOAT and the engineering of meaning. MOAT (Meaning of atag) is an application created by Alexandre Passant. A French PhD student in computer science who’s also a post-doc researcher in Ireland.

18. Its aim is to “represent the meaning of a tag and the way we model it in a machine-understandable way”, “using URIs of existing Semantic Web resources”.

19. “In order to represent these meanings in a machine-readable way (…) we think that Semantic Web, and especially URIs of existing resources can play an important role. Since they provide unique identifiers for resources of the real-world, we believe that they are one of the most efficient way to define it, either globally or in a tagging context.”

20. Ex. : when something is tagged with « Paris », Passant says (and his system allows only one-word tags), you need to know the meaning of this tag. Is it : • Paris (France). • Paris (Texas). • Paris (Hilton…)

21. To distinguish between these possibilities, a URI is attached to represent each of these « meanings » (such URI come from dbpedia, a RDFised version of Wikipedia, or geoname where locations receive IDs).

22. <http://tags.moat-project.org/tag/paris> a moat:Tag ; moat:name "paris" ; moat:hasMeaning [ a moat:Meaning ; moat:meaningURI <http://sws.geonames.org/2988507/> ; foaf:maker <http://example.org/alex/> ] ; moat:hasMeaning [ a moat:Meaning ; moat:meaningURI <http://sws.geonames.org/4402452/> ; foaf:maker <http://example.org/alex/> ; foaf:maker <http://myblog.net/user.rdf#me> ] ; moat:hasMeaning [ a moat:Meaning ; moat:meaningURI dbpedia:Paris_Hilton ; foaf:maker <http://myblog.net/user.rdf#me> ] .

23. Problem Just as URIs are treated as names while they only give access to information resources (being treated as URLs by Web agents thus confounding access and reference); by linking tags to URIs, it is believed that all the words refer like names.

24. Interestingly, Passant ‘s own example concerns a proper name (Paris). Philosophers like Wittgenstein and Quine have criticized such conception and the ambiguity of ostension in particular.

25. To sum up • Tags have become words • Words, proper names • Proper names are tantamount to URIs in the way they refer to things • URIs are thought to represent meanings URIs “represent the meaning of a tag and the way we model it”

26. Once again, access and reference are no longer distinguished. In fact, a word that is linked to a URI is, on the Web, linked to a URL, thanks to the technologies of the Web; the resource it gives access to being an entry of Wikipedia.

27. That’s exactly what Quine described as the « myth of the museum » : « Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum [here an encyclopedia] in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels ».

28. But that’s a theoretical judgment.

29. What is especially interesting is that such philosophically misguided conceptions of meaning have become concrete digital artifact (e.g. web applications).

30. Concepts, theories, meanings… that used to belong to an abstract level of reality are now becoming extant artifacts, still imbued with philosophy, but which, at the same time, happen to belong to the realm of industry.

31. How do such objections of a theoretical nature as the ones I mentioned connect with the new industrial realities where philosophical questions are raised, this is a major question for philosophy.