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=Tagunity: Content classification and community, the case for a conversation about practice based theories and social tagging=


 * keywords**: knowledge sharing, folksonomies, social tagging, simple ontologies, CoPs, activity theory, actor-network theory

Warren Crosbie, [|RMIT University] updated 1168922342

A literature review on the rationale for applying practice theories to the study of knowledge sharing, formal classifications (e.g. ontologies) and/or social tagging in databases on the World Wide Web. (//See// Introduction.)

This research identifies multiple approaches to the creation of content and classifications in databases on the World Wide Web (WWW):
 * Approaches to content structuring in online databases**
 * Facilitative content creation (emphasis on relationships, conversations and the context of shared practice)
 * Systematic content creation, classification of content takes place within the confines of an 'activity system' (see activity theory)
 * Content and its classification are actors in a dynamic network (see actor-network theory)
 * Formal content classification (e.g. taxonomies and ontologies)
 * Informal content classification (i.e. folksonomies, also known as 'distributed' or 'social tags).


 * Overlaps considered**
 * Formal approaches have social components (e.g. consensus building in ontology engineering)
 * Informal approaches may benefit from hierarchies of tags, and structured vocabularies
 * Overlapping approaches (e.g. context-oriented knowledge management; the pragmatic web; community driven metadata management; and Morville's vision for a sociosemantic Web).


 * Tentative preliminary conclusions **
 * 1) Databases are socially constructed resources
 * 2) Meaning is also socially constructed
 * 3) Database structures may inhibit the natural social processes that support the construction of meaning within communities
 * 4) There are overlaps in the way members of a community socially construct and share meaning (and knowledge), and the way database designers use social approaches to gather the information they need in order to create the necessary structure within //their// databases.

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