It could revolutionize the way we input our keywords. The Common Tag, a recent term put forth by a group of companies including Yahoo!, is a big step towards bringing semantic tagging to the World Wide Web.
The Common Tag is being introduced to bloggers and publishers through automated tagging tools like those offered by Zemanta. In addition, social tagging services Faviki and Zigtag will also offer the Common Tag format.
The hope is that the trend will catch, and soon everyone will be using the Common Tag, helping machines better understand just what it is exactly we’re talking about.
As it stands, tagging is currently relatively unstructured. While the same keyword could refer to many different topics, so could the same topic have many different keyword tags.
For example, London’s Heathrow Airport could be tagged as ‘LHR’, ‘London Heathrow’, ‘Heathrow’, ‘Heathrow Airport’, or any other combination of the above. By the same token, the tag ‘apple’ could refer to the fruit, the computer company, or Gwyneth Paltrow’s baby girl.
The idea behind the Common Tag is that content should be tagged with unique, well-defined concepts. This way, all the truly most relevant information about a topic will show up in search results, without the risk of being lost due to being improper tagging. The content will become easier for machines to aggregate.
The very cool thing about Common Tags is the metadata associated with each Tag defines the concept, while describing how it relates to other concepts.
The possibilities behind the Common Tag are potentially quite profitable for all involved. It could allow for the seamless presentation to the end user of written content that is easily connected with closely related retail goods and services. This would mean that the user has easy access to exactly what they are looking for, while the product and service providers are not forced to guess how the user will search for their desired topic.
Not only that, but related content, stored within the Common Tag’s metadata, would be connected and displayed automatically, again displaying to the end user accurately-related concepts that they may find useful or desirable.
In a sign of solidarity, Google and Yahoo! have begun reading the mark-up standard used by the Common Tag – RDFa – which allows annotating XHTML mark-up with semantics. The search engines are employing the new mark-up standard to help improve the presentation and other aspects of their search results.
Also currently on the Common Tag team are Freebase and DBPedia – in charge of vocabularies of meaning, and DERI (NUI Galway) and Adaptive Blue – in charge of search (with the help of Yahoo!, of course).
Hopefully we will see, with the development and spread of the Common Tag, tags that are much more reliable and useful.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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