Freedom and Restraint: Tags, Vocabularies and Ontologies

The benefit of metadata is widely recognized. However, the nature of that information and the method of production remains a topic of some debate. This division is most noticeable between those who believe in ’free tagging’, and those who prefer the more formal construction of an ontology to define both the vocabulary of the domain and the relationships between the concepts within it. Looking at the community surrounding online amateur authors and the descriptive metadata they have developed over the last thirty years we consider what we can learn from a mature but amateur tagging community. This paper considers how these two systems might be used together to add the easy usability of free tagging to ontology descriptions and the conceptual richness of ontologies to free tags