A few days ago, I made a case for implementing tags as the “trails” Vannevar Bush describes in his vision of the memex. Further proving that no thought is original, I came across an interesting paper entitled Tagging the Physical World (pdf), in which tags are used to describe, organize and even socialize memories in a memex system. Written by Yoelle S. Maarek of Google, and Natalia Maramasse,Yaakov Navon and Vova Soroka of IBM Research, the paper will be presented at the WWW2006 Tagging Workshop next Monday in Edinburgh.
The authors put forth a case study where a user attends a conference, and using a handheld device they record pictures of business cards. Those cards are then OCR’d, and automatic and folksonomic metadata is associated with the record. It’s a very interesting vision of what we may do with our mobiles. The authors focus the paper on extraction and tagging; however, it makes you think about how we may one day use our mobiles as full-on memory aids. We’ll always carry our mobiles; storage, image quality, bandwidth and usability will increase over time. It is fascinating to think what tools could be integrated into our mobiles to make them better memory aids. Tagging could certainly play a valuable role here, as folksonomy proves to be an excellent classification tool for re-finding.
The conference page has links to a number of excellent papers from the upcoming workshop. If you’re interested in some tagging reads, it’s well worth your time.
Tags: folksonomy, memex, tagging
