IMARK Lesson 8: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

One of the ways to describe electronic resources is to use metadata. Metadata allows users to describe information and provide context to information within the electronic file.

Tagging helps to describe the content of a web resource.Tagging provides content with context and meaning. It can provide different ways to navigate through content and discover new information.

Social bookmarking services allow you to save web addresses on the internet, under a personal account, and tag each page you find with keywords. The social aspects of these services allow users to share and create a collaborative tagging to describe and locate content on the web.

There are different ways in which sites and services allow a user to visualize the aggregated tags that he and other users have created, for example graphics, tag clouds, aggregated lists, tag searches and tag combinations.

Tags are also used in multiple social networking services and sites with different purposes: aggregating content about users, providing intuitive navigation, facilitating access to data and improving search results.