Inclusive social tagging and its support in Web 2.0 services

This paper investigates the Web 2.0 phenomenon of social tagging in the context of existing approaches to semantic data structuring. Social tagging is embedded into the space spanned by current structuring approaches like taxonomies, meta-data, and ontologies in order to identify its semantic and pragmatic foundations. Thereby, we use the Inclusive Universal Access paradigm to assess social tagging with respect to socio-technical criteria for inclusive and barrier-free provision and usage of web services. As a result of this analysis we propose a concept we chose to call “Inclusive Social Tagging”. We subsequently use the requirements set forth by this concept to assess the tagging functionality of currently popular Web 2.0 services. We found that these services differ significantly in their implementation of tagging functionality, and we did not discover any service providing full compliance with Inclusive Social Tagging requirements.