This paper addresses the concerns related to authority and control through focused exploration and description of one of the more popular social tagging sites, Flickr (http://www.flickr.com). After providing a brief background and introduction to Flickrâ s social and practical functionalities, this paper focuses on describing the siteâ s various tagging utilities and related exploration tools, addressing the tripartite concerns regarding the lack of vocabulary control, hierarchical organization, and the policies and procedures that allow for successful classification.

Pragmatism is a metatheoretical perspective within knowledge organization (KO) deriving from an American philosophical tradition active since the late 19th century. Its core feature is commitment to the evaluation of the adequacy of concepts and beliefs through the empirical test of practice: this entails epistemological antifoundationalism, fallibilism, contingency, social embeddedness, and pluralism. This article reviews three variants of Pragmatism historically influential in philosophyâ Pierceâ s scientifically oriented pragmaticism, Jamesâ s subjectivist practicalism; and Deweyâ s socially-directed instrumentalismâ and indicates points of contact with KO theories propounded by Bliss, Shera, and Hjørland. KO applications of classical Pragmatism have tended to converge toward a socially pluralist model characteristic of Dewey. Recently, Rortyâ s epistemologically radical brand of Neopragmatism has found adherents within KO: whether it provides a more advantageous metatheoretical framework than classical Pragmatism remains to be seen.

Social tagging, as a particular type of indexing, has thrown into question the nature of indexing. Is it a democratic process? Can we all benefit from user-created tags? What about the value added by professionals? Employing an evolving framework analysis, this paper addresses the question: what is next for indexing? Comparing social tagging and subject cataloguing; this paper identifies the points of similarity and difference that obtain between these two kinds of information organization frameworks. The subsequent comparative analysis of the parts of these frameworks points to the nature of indexing as an authored, personal, situational, and referential act, where differences in discursive placement divide these two species. Furthermore, this act is contingent on implicit and explicit understanding of purpose and tools available. This analysis allows us to outline desiderata for the next steps in indexing.

A 6 month Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded project on a terminology registry scoping study led by UKOLN in collaboration with Glamorgan and OCLC is just starting. This study aims to analyse issues related to potential delivery of a Terminology Registry as a shared infrastructure service within the JISC Information Environment. It will consider how a Registry might support development of terminology and other services within the context of a services oriented environment. The study is briefly outlined along with some previous work in this presentation. The author welcomes input and suggestions.

This study seeks to find out how human beings cluster Web pages naturally. 20 Web pages retrieved by the Northern Light search engine for each of 10 queries were sorted by 3 subjects into categories that were natural or meaningful to them. It was found that different subjects clustered the same set of Web pages quite differently and created different categories. The average inter-subject similarity of the clusters created was a low 0.27. Subjects created an average of 5.4 clusters for each sorting. The categories constructed can be divided into 10 types. About 1/3 of the categories created were topical. Another 20% of the categories relate to the degree of relevance or usefulness. The rest of the categories were subject-independent categories such as format, purpose, authoritativeness and direction to other sources. The authors plan to develop automatic methods for categorizing Web pages using the common categories created by the subjects. It is hoped that the techniques developed can be used by Web search engines to automatically organize Web pages retrieved into categories that are natural to users.

Presentation at the beginning of the workshop, given to set the tone and outline issues key to the event. [jtt]

The presentation was part of The 6th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop at the 11th ECDL Conference, Budapest, Hungary September 21st 2007 http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2007/progr amme.html / In 2004, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded a major terminology mapping initiative at the GESIS Social Science Information Centre in Bonn (GESIS-IZ), which will find its conclusion this year. The task of this terminology mapping initiative was to organize, create and manage â crossconcordancesâ between major controlled vocabularies (thesauri, classification systems, subject heading lists) centred around the social sciences but quickly extending to other subject areas. This project is the largest terminology mapping effort in Germany. The number and variety of controlled vocabularies targeted provide an optimal basis for insights and further research opportunities. To our knowledge, terminology mapping efforts have rarely been evaluated with stringent qualitative and quantitative measures. This research should contribute in this area. For the NKOS workshop, we plan to present an overview of the project and participating vocabularies, an introduction to the heterogeneity service and its application as well as some of the results and findings of the evaluation, which will be concluded in August.

Three empirical studies on characteristics of social classification are reported in this paper. The first study compared social tags with controlled vocabularies and title-based automatic indexing and found little overlaps among the three indexing methods. The second study investigated how well tags could be categorized to improve effectiveness of searching and browsing. The third study explored factors and radios that had the most significant impact on tag convergence. Finding of the three studies will help to identify characteristics of those tagging terms that are content-rich and that can be used to increase effectiveness of tagging, searching and browsing.

Social tagging, as a particular type of indexing, has thrown into question the nature of indexing. Is it a democratic process? Can we all benefit from user-created tags? What about the value added by professionals? Employing an evolving framework analysis, this paper addresses the question: what is next for indexing? Comparing social tagging and subject cataloguing; this paper identifies the points of similarity and difference that obtain between these two kinds of information organization frameworks. The subsequent comparative analysis of the parts of these frameworks points to the nature of indexing as an authored, personal, situational, and referential act, where differences in discursive placement divide these two species. Furthermore, this act is contingent on implicit and explicit understanding of purpose and tools available. This analysis allows us to outline desiderata for the next steps in indexing.

Proceedings 17th Workshop of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Special Interest Group in Classification Research / Presentation at the beginning of the workshop, given to set the tone and outline issues key to the event. [jtt]