Third enquiry: Tags and Ontologies
The third form of enquiry looks into tags and ontologies. In the whole project we aim to establish a two way street between cultural theory and philosophy on the one hand, and developments in the area of metadata and tagging on the other hand. This is especially the case in this stream of enquiry. We will look into some of the hidden philosophical assumptions in computer sciences, when they discuss the organisation of metadata. In return we will ask, how philosophy can take up some of the innovations in computer sciences.
What kind of ‘ philosophy’ is, for example, informs a computer language like XML (which allows to embed complex ‘ trees’ of descriptive information in the form of tags)? How does this compare to the Resource Definition Framework (RDF), a common framework for metadata, which aims to express metadata by defining relationships (and not, like XML, though direct description)? What happens, if these two principles merge? When, for example, RDF based relationships are expressed in XML (which is often the case)? To improve our understanding of the background of such questions we might have to look at the archival impulse, at historical practices of collecting and the collection, ask for early versions of catalogues, or look at the cultural history of descriptions that we take self evident (e.g. via authorship). We cannot develop such historical dimensions into a separate form of research.
But we can use them to think about new forms of metadata, ontologies and, especially, new forms of tagging. Some of them might be already established, some exist only in our thought experiments, and some we might aim to realise: How, for example, would a system look like that allows tags to go beyond the simple ascription of ‘ round’ to an orange? What would happen, if we instead describe an orange as ‘ 75% round’? Do tags always have to be semantic? What would change if we use tags that purely relate, without making a further descriptive statement – e.g. a tag of a melody that consist out of a fragment of this melody, and relates this melody to other melodies without including any other form of description? Could we construct tags that get activated when the next user enters a relationship with a piece of content? And how can we theorise the relationship between the tagging user and his or her object? Is it purely descriptive (Jane tags an image of an orange as ‘ round’), or is it more the object (that is: the image of an orange) that ‘ uses the users’ (that is: Jane) to find out more about itself?