Tagging in Voofie

The Voofie Tagging System

Tagging system is deployed in various social bookmarking sites and user content sites, which revolutionized the way people describe, organize and locate information. However, as the users have absolute freedom in choosing words as tags, they are often ambiguous, overly personalized, misspelled and inexact. The resultant tagging pattern is a mess that undermines the elegance of the tagging system. Hence, our platform will use a set of predefined tags that has a precise meaning. The semantics of the tags will also act as the subject classification for the rating mechanism. Special tags such as Target Audience, Genre and format will also be available to enhance searching experience.

Type of tags

There are two different types of tags: Concept Tag and Attribute Tag

Concept Tag

Concept tags, which are blue in color, represent the content of the post.  Each post should have 1 to 3 concept tags.  Voofie uses page titles from Wikipedia as concept tags since each article in Wikipedia represents a well-defined concept, which is based on consensus from millions of volunteers worldwide.  Basically most noteworthy concepts have been covered in Wikipedia, so the concept tags in Voofie should have also covered all the important concepts in the world.  If the concept you would like to tag did not appear in Voofie, it is probably not notable enough to be covered in Wikipedia, and hence you should choose another tag that is notable enough.

By using Wikipedia page titles, tagging can be accomplished regarding the titles' semantic meaning, indepenedent from the use of word or spelling.  Certain useful Wikipedia features also apply to Voofie:

Disambiguation:  One word may have many different meanings.  For example, "Cell" may mean Cell (Biology), Cell (CPU), Cell (battery).  In Voofie, when you type an ambiguous word in the tagging panel, you can click into the word to see a list of possible disambiguation and find out the tag that you exactly mean.

Selecting the right meaning for Disambiguation

Format of redirected tag

Redirection: Different words may mean the same thing.  For instance, Cell phone and Mobile phone mean the same thing.  In Voofie, when you tag "Cell phone", we will automatically tag "Mobile Phone" instead. 

Attribute Tag

Attribute tags are pink in color, which describe the nature and format of the post, rather than the content of the post.  Attribute tags help other users to quickly identify the right post to read, and help your posts to reach their audiences. There are several attributes:

Language: New posts are automatically tagged based on your language preference while the default value is English.  Each post must have one language tag.

Genre: It describes the format of the post so as to facilitate other users to locate suitable resources for their use at their particular usage.  For example, users want to learn how to use an iPhone may wish to locate a Tutorial about it, while those who want to compare iPhone with other mobile phones may wish to search for a Comparison. 

Level: A post tagged "Quantum Mechanics" can be a highly scholastic post for university professors, or just an introductory article targeted at secondary school students.  Hence, the level tags can be used to indicate the difficulty level for the material covered by the post.

Best Practice for Tag Selection

Choosing a tag that can best represent a post is very important as it directly affects how the post can reach its audiences and how you obtain Impact Factor from the post.  Choosing the right tag is more an art than a science.  Here are some general advices:

1. Be specific: The concept tags in Voofie have different level of generalization.  For example, "Quantum Mechanics" is a sub-field of "Physics".  Please tag "Quantum Mechanics", instead of the more general "Physics" tag.  Do not worry about tagging too specifically and cannot be reached by the general public.  We will categorize the posts into broad categories according to the concept tags.  
2. Be mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive:  It simply means try using tags that are not related to each other, and make sure the tags can represent all the major contents in the post.
3. Be representative: There is endless choice for the best tags but some choices are more representative.  For example, "Music in Hong Kong" is more representative than using two separate tags of "Music" and "Hong Kong".