14 DAY TRIAL // Tags are an important tool in the online ecosystem and have become an integral part of it. But as useful as they can be there have been some limitations that haven't been solved since they first started being used. A new format, Common Tag, established by a group of leading web companies, aims to take tagging to a new level by making it a much better and reliable resource.
“Common Tag is an open tagging format developed to make content more connected, discoverable and engaging. Unlike free-text tags, Common Tags are references to unique, well-defined concepts, complete with metadata and their own URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can more easily create topic hubs, cross-promote their content, and enrich their pages with free data, images and widgets,” reads the official press release.
The major problem with tags is that some concepts can be defined by several slightly different tags while one tag may apply to many different concepts. Often you would have to use variations of the same tag to make sure they are correctly cataloged and picked up by search engines or filters. The new format will end all those problems by having multiple tags associated with the same metadata and URLs.
“Everything about New York City is tagged with one concept for New York City and everything about jaguar the animal is tagged with one concept for jaguar the animal. Common Tag also provides access to useful metadata that defines each concept and describes how the concepts relate to one another. For example, metadata for the Barack Obama Common Tag indicates that he's the President of the United States and that he's married to Michelle Obama,” the press release explains the system.
The companies behind the project, AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo!, Zemanta, and Zigtag, are some well-known names with the biggest being Yahoo, which also announced its commitment on its official blog.