Key-Value Tagging

The act of tagging consists of labelling objects with keywords [Wikipedia]. Tagging, the way it works now, is attaching separate keywords with objects. Although we might attach multiple keywords with the same object, the words are independent of each other (Don’t argue that the words are related in the sense of tag clusters. Let me get to the point).

In its present form, tagging no wonder has created a revolution. But would it not be more useful if tagging were in the form of key-value pairs as well. I should have an option of either tagging objects with single words (as it works now), or with key-value pairs.

How would this help? I had written about Problems with Podcasts sometime back. Now consider a model in which I could not only have skip-points which mention where a particular topic starts, but also what these topics are and my own comments on it.

If you compare a single podcast to a set of blog entries, ‘key-value’ tagging could be compared to comments to a single blog entry. It would look somewhat like this:

Although this can be done using XML so easily, an end user would not like writing XML code. So a simple interface could be provided where the user writes the time and the comment and this is clubbed with the podcast and can be accessed anywhere on the web. Further, the user could add any information, for example, the name of the speaker (example, speaker=Gautham) or the location where the podcast was created (example, location=Bangalore).

And just like tags, nothing is pre-defined. The user can add just about any ‘key-value’ tags to any object. Again, as I keep mentioning, RDF has solutions to these. But ‘Keep It Stupidly Simple’ is how the web works. So be it. :)

I have been talking about Tag evolution here.