Semantic tagging on historical maps

Tags assigned by users to shared content can be ambiguous. As a possible solution, we propose semantic tagging as a collaborative process in which a user selects and associates Web resources drawn from a knowledge context. We applied this general technique in the specific context of online his-torical maps and allowed users to annotate and tag them. To study the effects of semantic tagging on tag production, the types and categories of obtained tags, and user task load, we conducted an in-lab within-subject experiment with 24 par-ticipants who annotated and tagged two distinct maps. We found that the semantic tagging implementation does not af-fect these parameters, while providing tagging relationships to well-defined concept definitions. Compared to label-based tagging, our technique also gathers positive and negative tag-ging relationships. We believe that our findings carry impli-cations for designers who want to adopt semantic tagging in other contexts and systems on the Web