Trant Article

Question: Many organizations waste time and money researching answers to questions already answered or creating content that may already have been done by others within the organization. What shortfalls of social tagging does Trant identify that might prohibit a searchable tagging system to be a successful aid within an organization such as a business or school?

Answer: Trant names several reasons why searchable tagging systems may not work out as well as some proponents say it will. First, she mentions one potential downfall is the relativistic natural of socially-created tagging systems. That is, often information is retrieved, but perhaps it is more by chance than intention. Secondly, she notes that, through studies, it is shown that their is a large amount of inconsistency that is inherent in user-created vocabulary. A large amount of terms that people may use as keywords are bounds to be used differently than how other people use them and perhaps just inconsistently over time. One other issue she mentions is synonymy and polysemy. Polysemy, meaning the fact that there are different meanings of the same word, will cause problems by returning completely irrelevant search results half of the time while searching for a tagged word that is polysemous.