Alexandre Passant continues to do wonderful things, this time with the MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) project. He's extended Richard Newman's excellent Tagging ontology so that it expresses (possible) meanings of tags in a semantic web-friendly way (i.e., using a URI). In his example, the tag "paris" is associated with two uris from Geonames, one for the city in France and one for the city in Missouri.

I imagine that an additional possible meaning would be Paris, the Trojan, like so?

<moat:Tag rdf:about="http://tags.moat-project.org/tag/paris">
<moat:name><![CDATA[paris]]></moat:name>
  <moat:hasMeaning>
    <moat:Meaning>
      <moat:meaningURI rdf:resource="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris_%28mythology%29"/>
      <foaf:maker rdf:resource="http://example.org/user/foaf/1"/>
    </moat:Meaning>
  </moat:hasMeaning>
</moat:Tag>

The project includes a client-server architecture to facilitate disambiguation between tags as a user enters them.

In a variety of small projects, I have made use of Richard Newman's Tagging ontology, in large part because it facilitates capturing information not only about the tag and the item tagged, but also information about associated tags, the creator of the tag, and when the tag was created. Those bits of information are essential to a pedagogically useful application of tags--creating a history of one's thinking and interests. MOAT looks like it will make such an application even easier at the same time that helps to disambiguate meanings.

Perhaps more importantly, MOAT seems to provide a mechanism for dealing with what are sometimes called 'functional' tags--tags that in a way have no meaning in themselves, but are instead used only as a sort of filter. The most common example is tags used to identify a conference or a presentation at a conference, like "ELI08" for the Educause Learning Initiative 2008 conference. In addition to disambiguation, then, MOAT might be used to help people find each other, for example by helping people using "ELI08" and "ELI2008" as tags discover that they are really tagging for the same purpose. (See Jim Hendler's third piece on academic publishing, as well as my previous post about the 3 tags rule about this and related issues).

Similarly, we've been struggling to get an efficient system for tagging blog posts in umwblogs.org (our campus installation of Wordpress Multiuser) so that we can organize posts by course. So far, only the fairly ugly tag that includes section and semester info provides disambiguation. I.e., "Engl205" as a tag for organizing posts doesn't work--there are many sections of English 205 each semester, and the course runs every semester. So to disambiguate, the tag has to be something like "Engl205sec04Fall07." Not especially user-friendly. With the upcoming WP and Drupal clients, are problems are solved!