At Euro IA 2006 I presented a poster to illustrate a metadata system developed by the BBC to combine folksonomies and controlled vocabularies, colloquially known as “the threshold”. The motivation for developing the system was to combine the responsiveness and cheapness of folksonomies with the disambiguation and aggregation power of the controlled vocabularies. The bulk of the poster is a visualisation of the tags on one side of the threshold and the CV values on the other, with some struggling to get other the top. The tags are genuine tags applied by BBC journalists to BBC content, covering both terms that have reached critical mass and those that never made it into the CVs. Tags include local curiosities, obscure bands, enigmatic phrases, mundanities and the occasional illustration that the journalist just wasn’t sure what they were doing. The tags provide a strange view into British life whilst the terms that make it into the CV provide an insight into BBC life. Sample tags:
- hagley & district light car club
- holycowbell
- charity golf day
- yankees
- bruises
- cassava
- audrey tatou
- curious george
- bingo evening
- audrey busfield
- dimaggio’s wife
- big apple
- jogglebury playhouse
- lilac
- stan webb’s chicken shack
- go play further up your own end
- no made sense
- metal casings
- eggstock
- bumblehole
- pinvin first school fete
- common or garden
- lovely listener
- strictly pole dancing
- mypole
- wild rhubarb
- loofah plant
- vintage
- dresden
- big cash prizes
- the grim
- bouldering
- future
- somewhere else
Sample CV terms:
- Avenue Q (musical)
- anagrams
- Cryer, Barry (comedian)
- Fifa World Cup
- riots
- Gloucestershire Cricket Cup
- Frankfurt
- rock climbing
- Pride Festival
- camp sites
- The Omen (film)
- metatarsals
- Da Vinci Code, the (book)
- vineyards
- St. George’s Cross
- breweries
- meditation
- Falun Gong
- carol singing
- Hurst, Geoff (sports personality)
The poster also included a brief explanation of the tagging process, an explanation of the CVs structure and some information on the workings of the threshold itself.