Pragmatic thought as a philosophical foundation for collaborative tagging and the Semantic Web
| Published date | 14 May 2018 |
| Pages | 575-587 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2017-0101 |
| Date | 14 May 2018 |
| Author | Christopher Bruhn,Sue Yeon Syn |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Pragmatic thought as a
philosophical foundation for
collaborative tagging and
the Semantic Web
Christopher Bruhn
Leon & Toby Cooperman Library, Hunter College,
New York, New York, USA, and
Sue Yeon Syn
Department of Library and Information Science,
The Catholic University of America, Washington, District of Columbia, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to use ideas drawn from two founders of American pragmatism,
William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, in order to propose a philosophical foundation that supports the
value of collaborative tagging and reinforces the structure and goals of the Semantic Web.
Design/methodology/approach –The study employs a close analysis of key literature by James and
Peirce to answer recent calls for a philosophy of the Web and to respond to research in the LIS literature that
has assessed the value and limitations of folksonomy. Moreover, pragmatic views are applied to illustrate the
relationships among collaborative tagging, linked data, and the Semantic Web.
Findings –With a philosophical foundation in place, the study highlights the value of the minority tags that
fall within the so-called “long tail”of the power law graph, and the importance of granting sufficient time for
the full value of folksonomy to be revealed. The discussion goes further to explore how “collaborative
tagging”could evolve into “collaborative knowledge”in the form of linked data. Specifically, Peirce’s triadic
architectonic is shown to foster an understanding of the construction of linked data through the functional
requirements for bibliographic records entity-relation model and resource description framework triples, and
James’s image of the multiverse anticipates the goals Tim Berners-Lee has articulated for the Semantic Web.
Originality/value –This study is unique in using Jamesian and Peircean thinking to argue for the value of
folksonomy and to suggest implications for the Semantic Web.
Keywords William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Pragmatism, Folksonomy, Collaborative tagging,
Semantic Web
Paper type Conceptual paper
1. Introduction
When it first appeared, collaborative tagging, or folksonomy, was celebrated for the
diversity of perspectives it was capable of representing and its expression of those
perspectives through natural language. More recently, however, concerns about the ability
of tags to help users find specific resources have led to proposals to rein in that diversity.
Such proposals would threaten to mold folksonomies into, at very least, semi-controlled
vocabularies, thus restricting the same traits for which they initially drew praise. Moreover,
these limitations were proposed within less than a decade of folksonomies’first appearance.
Thinking of tagging as a collaborative knowledge system, scholars have recognized a
close and potentially synergistic relationship between folksonomy and developments
toward the Semantic Web. Gruber (2008) has made a distinction between the “collected
intelligence”of the Social Web and the anticipated “collective intelligence”of the Semantic
Web, and argues for the benefits of combining elements of each. Social tags as semantic tags
have been examined by various researchers to utilize them as resource description
framework (RDF) triples (Huang et al., 2012; Torre, 2009), identify semantic relationships
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 74 No. 3, 2018
pp. 575-587
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-07-2017-0101
Received 12 July 2017
Revised 15 December 2017
Accepted 17 December 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
575
Pragmatic
thought
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