Sunday, August 24, 2008

Tagarchy

I define the concept of a tagarchy as an arrangement of objects, people, elements, values, grades, orders, classes, etc., by tags. This contrasts to a hierarchy, in which the structure of the arrangement implies a sort of ranking: the collection is first divided by the most important property, then by the second most important, and so on. This does not mean that a tagarchy is a sort of anarchy either, because each element in the collection has multiple tags associated to it, and these tags can be used to create an ad hoc hierarchy, and there are some strict rules on how each element in the collection should be tagged.

Tagarchies are used in many Web 2.0 applications, Delicious and Flickr being two of them.

1 comment:

Telcontar said...

I've written an entry about something similar, but more about bettering folksonomy-based tagging of generic data. See it here.