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Are tags a temporary fad or an important addition that will give more structure and value to the Web? The promise of a semantic Web, a Web with associated knowledge or metadata that allow meaningful, context-aware search and navigation, has been around for a while. Yet it remains only a promise.

Could user-tagging deliver on the promise? The challenge with freeform, user-generated tags is the lack of formal structure. There’s little or no semantic association between tags and their related content. My computer doesn’t know whether “zuni” used as a tag is in reference to the San Francisco restaurant or the New Mexico Native American tribe.

It may be misguided to compare user-generated tags with formal taxonomies and the semantic Web. The user tag is a phenomenon onto itself, now with its own name: folksonomies. For more on the subject, check out Adam Mathes’ article, in which he contrasts user-created metadata (tags) with professional- or author-generated descriptions.

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