After some hard weeks with only one hand on the keyboard but the whole mind full of ideas, now some new thinkings about Tags and its order.
Look at the following drawing. Some weeks ago i thought about how to connect the tags with some order. Slowly it gets clearer. One have to use existing classifiations. My first try will use wikipedia to do so. theoretically it is large enough to give satisfying results, let’s see what exercises will bring.
One additional question ist if it will be to much affected be the encyclopaedia.
What do you think about this try?
[Update] Some explanations to the image above. From left to right the bubbles stand for the following concepts. Services are all the origins of data (e.g. delicious, flickr, 43things, technorati, upcoming, lastfm) where the data comes from. Filter does what the word says it cleans the results if necessary. The tag-databases stores all tags found for a user. Thesaurus cleans up again. Encyclopdedia (e.g. Wikipedia, OpenCyc, Freebase) gives structure to the whole thing. With its categories various keywords get there order by request to it. At the end all is set into one profile of interests.
Further questions? Sure there are many things behind, but this glue can be discussed…
A picture says more than 1000 words? Bah. Could you enlighten the workflow a little? If I understand, you want to look up the tags in WP and draw connections between them based on WP links between the concepts?
I add some explanation to the image above. The connections between the tags are constructed based on categories that underlay Wikipedia (or other encyclopedias).
Keep in mind that people throughout the centuries tried in different ways to categorize mankinds knowledge. The idea of combining folksonomy and taxonomy is quiet fascinating, but IMHO you should decide carefully about the mechanisms you use. WikiPedia seems to be a good screen, but if we talk about and use WikiPedia we should not forget the history of encyclopedias and the spirit of their founders like Diderot et al.