Keywords, tags... and what else?

Keywords and their latest versions, called tags, are the object of this paper. Those expressions are treated as elements of the lexical systems of respective languages: the keyword language and the tag language. Our presentation of those vocabulary groups is intended to demonstrate that they are not homonymous, in structural or functional respects. Those two lexical resources are presented rather from the viewpoint of the theory of indexing and retrieval languages as well as the information search theories. Considering the future of the languages in question, the author presents the folksonomies and the possibilities of application of the respective vocabulary collections in the construction of tools required for semantization of the information retrieval environment in the Internet, including the construction of ontology and thought maps. Special attention was paid to the idea that keywords and tags are practically equivalent to specific "languages" which, similarly to natural languages, are subjected to continuous changes. For that reason, it is necessary to regularly monitor them and consider their practical application in document and information description and search. The works on keywords constitute a step towards the construction of linguistic tools for the needs of a semantic website. This paper is a contribution to the discussion on the development of keyword vocabularies created at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Such vocabularies constitute part of the Slavic bibliographic information system