Improving Personal and Social Information Management with Advanced Tagging

This paper describes an innovative tagging model incorporated into a web 2.0 social and personal information management application. Our work utilizes web 2.0 tagging concepts in a new way in an effort to provide better support for users’ needs for contextualization and personalization of their information spaces for both personal and social purposes, management of social engagements, and formation of user-defined social relationships. In this paper, we first give a brief overview of OpnTag, a research implementation developed by our group which we have used to experiment with various aspects of organizing and managing personal libraries of information within a social environment. We then explain how OpnTag supports each of the aforementioned concepts (both personal and social contextualization, social engagements, and social relationships) through its advanced tagging features. We also describe the motivation behind each of these features and their envisioned usage.