Taxonomies to Tags
Metadata in the geospatial world has traditionally been highly structured, making use of taxonomies and thesauri. Several websites with large user communities are taking a completely different approach – tagging.
David Weinberger describes the structured approach as “trees”, and tagging as the equivalent of “piles of leaves”. If you’re into the use of metadata on the web the report David wrote for Release 1.0 titled Taxonomies and Tags: From Trees to Piles of Leaves is well worth a read. It covers many issues that will be of interest to people working in the metadata field.