Tagging Places

Tagging refers to the process of annotating entities with metadata. There are a number of kinds of tagging that are of interest for place-based applications. Locative tags, for example, are used to geocode entities, to associate them with a location in the form of latitude and longitude or address. A place-based computing system can then dynamically superpose these geocoded entities with place. For some applications it is necessary to create all of the tags from scratch. (This is what we have had to do with our spatialized notebooks for example.) In other cases, however, it may be possible to build on grassroots collaborative tagging projects like del.icio.us. These tags are freely chosen by the people doing the tagging, and are presumably meaningful to them. The classification which emerges from such a community is known as a folksonomy. For an example of collaborative geocoding of images, see the Mappr site, which is based on another tagging project, Flickr.

We are currently working on a method of using tagging to generate spatialized notebooks from online collections of primary and secondary sources. Here is a high-level description of the process, using the history of brewing in Ontario as an example.

• In a del.icio.us account, create a unique tag for the notebook (e.g., brewsn)
  

• Collect online primary and secondary sources, tagging each with the notebook tag and with an entity_instance tag like the following (the granularity and specificity of these is set by the project, but they don’t have to be determined in advance)
  

• person_carling_john
  

• person_labatt_john
  

• person_okeefe_eugene
  

• daterange_1828_1911
  

• institution_carling_brewing_and_malting
  

• institution_labatts_brewery
  

• place_toronto
  

• place_london
  

• place_prescott
  

• daterange_1882_ca
  

• institution_great_western_railway
  

• event_fire
  

• event_confederation
  

• A page of tags for a particular notebook are found in directory under account name and notebook tag, along with an RSS feed (which is XML)
  

• e.g., http://del.icio.us/rss/placebased/brewsn
  

• The RSS feed contains the following information for the channel (i.e., the notebook)
  

• Name
  

• URL
  

• List of sources
  

• For each source, it contains
  

• Name
  

• URL
  

• Tag creator
  

• Date and time of tagging
  

• Description of resource
  

• Collection of tags
  

• At any point, the current collection of tags can be compiled into a version of the notebook by processing the RSS feed
  

• For each source, get an offline copy and transform it for use in the notebook
  

• For each entity tag, create a page of links organized in an appropriate fashion for that kind of entity
  

• e.g., Person
  

• Carling, Isaac
  

• Carling, John
  

• Carling, William
  

• Dalton, Joshua D
  

• Labatt, John
  

• OKeefe, Eugene
  

• …
  

• For each instance tag, create a page of links (information about the nature of the source is created during tagging by using the resource description field)
  

• e.g., Labatt, John
  

• Entry for John Labatt in Dictionary of Canadian Biography
  

• Essay about Labatt Breweries from company list at UWO Business Library
  

• Image of brewery from Canadian Illustrated News
  

• …
  

• For each place tag, geocode link to create another tag for latitude and longitude using decimal degrees
  

• Create a map of geocoded links to location/place pages
  

• Package notebook for deployment on handheld or tablet computer with GPS