Semantic Void

What happens when you cross Tagging with Machine Learning? Well you get a tool that learns as you tag. Sounds interesting? Then read on.

Learns? But what.

Thats what I asked myself yesterday. What I visualised was a tool that learns how to tag and what to tag from you. It would learn from past experiences, what you would like to tag and also what keywords (tags) you would likely use for them. And finally one day, when it has a large enough knowledge base, it could probably automate the entire task for you.

Imagine

Imagine having a your own personal crawler, spidering the web in search of pages that might interest you and even saving the most likely ones. Imagine coming to office and seeing your toRead list already populated by the bot.

Sounds too optimistic? Well I’ll give it a try. Until then you’ll have to do what humans do best - tagging - on your own.

The Present And The Future

Tagging has been there for quite sometime now, although it seems to be picking momentum after the Web2.0 meme. But the question one needs to answer is that “Has tagging evolved?“. It has yet to evolve out of its stone age era.

Tagging basically deals with organizing information retrieval. But yet current systems don’t seem to apply any of the information retrieval optimizations to it. It could prove useful and relevant if it was treated as a mere search rather than a whole new concept (the very reason why non-techie users are not lured into tagging). It would also prove to be more accurate if the IR preprocessing like stemming, synonym etc could be applied to it. The knowledge acquired in the process is very valuable due to the human intelligence behind it and can be exploited in many useful ways.
But tagging has evolved to some extent. It has evolved from single word tags to multi-word tags. It has evolved in terms of granularity from the Document (del.icio.us) to the Content (recoja, Google Notebook).

What we need to focus on is what more can be done with it (tagging) rather than just replicate what already can be done with it. What do you think could be the evolutionary steps in tagging?