Should we tie our tags to some existing structured vocabularies?

Question

Having a consistent tagging system or not is one of the factors that contribute to discoverability, usability and reusability of the site and its content.

Ontologies and other forms of structured vocabularies can help with that. Are there any that would be useful here?

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

Comments

A reasonable consistent tagging system can also help keeping up the quality and level of content. On some science sites I saw it happen that laymen who dont know much about the subject started to tag their questions with plain everyday language terms instead of using proper subfield tags and scientific keywords.

This post has been migrated from the Open Science private beta at StackExchange (A51.SE)

Answer 1

The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) < http://bit.ly/o-a-t-p > is evolving a tag vocabulary for OA. Here are the project-approved tags to date < http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/OATP_tags >.

Disclosure: I'm the founder and manager of OATP, which launched in 2009. I'm not arguing that Open Science QA should use the OATP tags, merely pointing out that they've undergone 5+ years of real-world evolution and are available for use. Each OATP tag starts with an "oa." prefex, for example, "oa.journals". But the tags could be used elsewhere with or without that prefix.

Comments

For some reason, both links in this answer seem to be broken (?) ...

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Thanks for catching that. The software was treating the final ">" as part of the URL (grr). I revised the original answer to add white space.