Some time ago I found a very interested technology: Topic Maps. It solves to find information and to share knowledge. One of examples of this technology is presented on this site. See "tags", "related tags", "tag synonyms" and so on. So my questions are:
- Does somebody use it to increase usability and to increase accuracy of the search results on a web site?
- What common problems, difficulties, features will I meet when I start of using it?
ADDED:
Points of usage:
Issues:
- lack of integration with other site's subsystems (poor design)
- weak visual presentation
- collection of information (auto suggestion, additional searching tags, synonyms, primary tags or terms)
- categorization and association of information (synonyms, associations)
- initial management, because of lack information (lack of dictionary and associations)
Answer
Problems that I would devise a plan how to tackle:
- What to do with synonymous tags, most commonly the plural form.
This will result in several tags effectively saying the same thing (think "pattern" and "patterns"), thus navigation is a bit harder and tag count might not reflect reality.
One way to alleviate this problem is to auto suggest tags, in hopes people will use the existing ones. - How to deal with tag hierarchy.
For example, I want to tag a question/post about a dog with "dog". But I'd like people looking for "pets", "animals", "canine", "fauna", "mammals" to reach this post as well. So should I always tag with the entire hierarchy in mind, or build a mechanism that knows how to associate tags as well?
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