In a move that pushes last week's discussion of tag-passing to the next level, Stephen has come up with Tagging, a great new Ning application to enable the consolidation of similar tags. Tagging has an API that will enable applications to poll for "virtually synonymous" tags, and then output a broader range of results based on the accessed pool of synonyms and not just the individually searched tag. Stephen explains:

Virtually synonymous means that two tags mean the same thing in practise. Variant spellings (web2.0 and web20, or colour and color) and plurals (hack and hacks) are usually virtually synonymous. Siblings are not virtually synonymous (cars and trucks).

Very cool. This might allow Freshtags to pull synonymous content from multiple blogs, or enable TagOverlay to overlay synonyms as well as tags onto the site you're processing, & that's only the beginning. Great work!

Filed in: tags, webtech, folksonomy, tagging