Using tag bundles in intranets
By Maish Nichani | 27 Jun 2011 Categorized under: Information Architecture, Intranets
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It’s common for enterprises to have a document library in their intranets that houses all types of administrative and operational content. Such a document library usually has a taxonomy to improve the discoverability and findability of content. However, there is one problem: documents need to get into the library first! Submitting a document to the library involves filing or tagging the document with the right taxonomic terms, a procedure that can make people see red if not done properly. Tag bundles can help simplify this procedure and also improve the use of such document libraries.
Quick glance
If you’re already familiar with the topic and its problems, browse this slide deck instead to see how tag bundles can help.
A scenario
First, let’s consider a scenario. Let’s say we have a document library, which is managed by a faceted taxonomy. This faceted taxonomy has three key facets: Countries, Sectors and Document types. Let’s say you’re a staffer in the organisation who regularly uploads project reports (document type) for the agriculture industry (sector) in Vietnam (country).
Going by the traditional way you will have to make three selections to specify the correct taxonomic terms to tag the document.
Having many terms in each facet makes it difficult to select the right term, unless there is help from the interface in the form of auto-complete or recently used tags.
Auto-complete
The 'Auto-complete' feature will try to predict the tag by suggesting tags based on the first few characters you type. So, if you type “agr”, it may suggest tags such as “agriculture, agri food”, etc. It is useful to know that this feature can get the terms from two sources: from previously used tags or from a pre-defined list (aka taxonomic terms).
Recently used tags
The 'Recently used tags' feature digs into your profile and past submissions and presents some terms that might be relevant to you. This is cool if it works well.
Limitations of auto-complete and recently used tags
The problem with auto-complete is that you have to interact with the interface multiple times and even type in the characters.
The ‘recent term’ design solves some of the problems with auto-complete, but it has its own set of problems. The recent term links are usually linked to each facet. You will still have to go through a series of clicks to associate the right terms. Furthermore, these links keep changing, trying to keep up with your preferences. You then have the classic Amazon problem – order a Barbie DVD for your child and then Amazon keeps recommending weird Barbie stuff to you all the time!
Even if recent terms are used in the context of a single page, then you have the problem of going through the tags and selecting the right ones.
This is where tag bundles come to the rescue.
What are tag bundles
Tag bundles are set of pre-defined terms. If your work revolves around specific areas then you could define a tag bundle upfront to represent that area. For example, you could define a tag bundle with the terms: Vietnam, Agriculture, Project report if you regularly upload or keep track of such documents. The tag bundle now behaves like a unit.
Tag bundles are not new. Delicious uses them (or used to use them) nicely. However, there were some drawbacks, which we’ll cover in a while.
Tagging with bundles
To tag a document with the terms in the bundle you just have to select the bundle. The terms will be applied to the document. Yes, that’s about it.
If you have a bundle that has fewer terms than what is required, say, ‘Brazil’ and ‘Infocomm’, then the interface will prompt you to enter the Document type only.
Remember the tag bundle is a unit of meaning. Therefore the unit along with the terms always go together.
A note on Delicious, it does not allow tagging a bookmark with tag bundles. It allows browsing by tag bundles though.
Browsing with bundles
You can browse the document library by selecting the tag bundle. Why would you want to do this? To quickly filter the documents you’re interested in. If your job scope covers two or three specific portfolios, then you can create the respective tag bundles and browse the document library very easily, usually with a simple click.
If you’re doing this, then you should be aware of one possible drawback. By just viewing everything by tag bundles, you could be creating what Eli Pariser calls the Filter Bubble – missing out on stuff outside your tag bundles. To avoid this trap, we recommend a two-zone structure, one for everything and the other for your stuff.
Tag bundle is a simple concept that can lead to some interesting implications, for example, consider the Dropzone.
Dropzone
We can have a dropzone on the browser where staff can easily drag-and-drop their documents. This makes it super easy to submit documents to the library.
Tag bundles and free tags
With the scenario given earlier, you can be forgiven for thinking that tag bundles apply to taxonomy related stuff only. That is not correct. In fact, Delicious uses it with free tags. One can therefore imagine using tag bundles with social spaces on the intranet. For example, you may have a Twitter-like app on your intranet, and you could use tag bundles to quickly zoom into conversations that meet your criteria.
Conclusion
As you can see, tag bundles can help relieve the pain of tagging content on the intranet. But with power comes responsibility. It is not a stretch to imagine a scenario where one has so many tag bundles that it ceases to be of any value. Used in a proper and sensible way tag bundles can help increase the adoption and contribution of intranets.
By Simon Goh | Jun 27 2011
A great metadata profiling innovation for people who deal with consistent types of documents. And also great when the types of documents are confined, such as in a project setting coupled with the role you play. Certainly makes it much easier to contribute, and in some cases overcome the problem of incomplete tagging.
One thought from this is to suggest tag bundles as tags are entered. And these tag bundles can come from previous tags combination entered, apart from pre-defining them. This is something that Delicious offers too, just that selection is by each term.
To manage the selection from multiple tag bundles, perhaps when we filter tag bundles.
The other consideration has to do with administrative metadata, that appplies when we are thinking about situations like document collaboration and version control.
By maish | Jun 27 2011
Simon: Just came across this paper from IEEE on auto-tag bundles. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5643503
Seems to be a good direction but would like to see take up based on a pre-defined list first.
By patrick c walsh | Jun 29 2011
Tagging is such a minefield! If we could just get everyone to think as an IA does there would be no problem.
Tagging by human,.expecially in intranets,is the only option and may be for quite sometime as consistently semantically extracting meaning is very difficult at the moment and probably beyond the resources of most intranets.
Tag bundles can certainly help but I have two caveats -
-A lot of people won’t put in any sort of a tag at all
- They may pick the bundle that is nearest- OK it’s got Vietnam, it’s got agrigulture, OK it isn’t a project report but who cares? I can really see this happening and one wrong tag can make the whole thing invalid.
The challenge is to ensure that tagging is done consistently and IMHO this can only be done though more centralized control of documentation (aka The Lean Intranet) I feel a post coming on…
By maish | Jun 29 2011
Hi Patrick,
Yes, you’re right about auto-tagging, it’s does not really help in the long run.
You’re right about careless tagging and I see this as the real challenge.
The interface can help here, making it easy for them to select or confirm the right options.
Having a centralised team is very promising but don’t know how this can scale. It seems to be fine for a 2000-5000 people company.
Then there is the social method. We’re experimenting with “thank” links on the intranet (similar to the Like button) and we’re hoping the egoboo factor can take shape—people would want to get it right because now others can participate and give some real quick feedback.
I guess small experiments are the only option
By Simon Goh | Jun 29 2011
How about a variety of tagging approaches presented at the same time, depending on the likely profile of audience that will tag? We do a lot of study on retrieval, perhaps we can study contribution. We provide faceted navigation, perhaps we can do faceted tagging
By roberta | Jun 30 2011
Thanks for the interesting article. Speaking from a library perspective (and straying away from the intranet context), we supply a number of predefined tags (from a controlled vocab) to bundles of similar content, then enhance this record by record. I’d like to see user-assigned tags replace some of our simpler record by record enhancement, as it is just not cost effective for thousands of records. The big challenge is getting users to make the effort to add a tag voluntarily. If you have a diffuse community it’s terribly hard. Recently I’ve been looking for examples of organisations that have successfully applied a micropayment-per-tag method (amazon mechanical turk-style). I do think there has to be some sort of tangible incentive.
By maish | Jul 01 2011
Roberta: Have you tried user-generated tags feature that you’ve outlined? Because, there is a tendency for user-gen initiatives to surprise! They might just work. Just that we need to make it easy for them to do.
However, user-gen tags might be the “good enough” variety. If we want strict control then it looks like some sort of central control is required.
The micropayment per tag method may increase your management costs. You’ll have to spend time vetting the submissions. Kind of defeats the purpose. Don’t see how this can be automated. Do share what you find.
By Benxamin | Jul 05 2011
I like the idea of having tag bundles be auto-generated based on frequently used cases. But I think that they should be a user-specific feature, following the principles of gradual engagement. So that if you are new, you get all the options. And once you have used it a few times, you have some sets of bundles that you can edit or otherwise manage.
By maish | Jul 05 2011
Benxamin, this is interesting. Yes, people need to manage their bundles. This way they can keep tabs on what’s out there for them as well as make it easy for them to submit documents. But it would be nice have these bundles auto-suggested, but this would requite some real complex data mining on the software side.
By roberta | Jul 07 2011
hi maish, yes we have tried user-assigned tags. When given free option, the tags are often not useful (eg abbreviations that only make sense to the individual user, and many mis-spellings). This is on top of the descriptive metadata we ourselves assign, so it doesn’t affect discovery too much, but neither does it help cut down on our time spent per record. Perhaps if we offer user tagging from a set CV it would work better. The issue there of course is maintaining the CV.