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Summary

Many tools use some kind of tag-normalizations. This seems to be a fundamental part of each tagging engine wich should probably be copied by OSSTag.

• ccHost [4] - all tags are converted to lower-case
• FreeTag [5] - Tag-normalization (lowercase, removal of non-alphanumeric chars) -> searching for NY, ny and N.Y. will all find the same results

Tagging Structure

Only three tools go beyond a flat tagging structure:

• Tasty [6] allows to tag Things and Users.
• Infomanager [7] uses graphs / paths
• Tagging Prototype [8] from Timothy - 3-level-tagging

What to tag

No tool made any attempt to use some special thesaurus for tagging. Some really good ideas can be found here: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2006052522234947 [9]

A more concrete way to use a special thesaurus with information from Wikipedia is described at Which tags do we allow [10]

Interfaces

• Tasty [6] has an interface via HTTP GET/POST
• Taggee [11] has an interface via HTTP GET/POST

This is also a way we could use to provide a central tagging server

Distribution

No tool implements distributed tagging-engines. All use a central database.

Conclusion

The tool that is closest to what we need would be FreeTag [5].

I suggest to write a prototype from scratch with the primary goal to try out several tagging-structures. OSSTag v0.1 could be enhanced for 3-level-tagging and n-level-tagging in combination with wikipedia or ACM [12] thesaurus. Then we could try to tag a project with each combination of these ways and see which fits best for our needs ..

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