Fringe Contacts: People Tagging – from Library Clips

Watch out you may get tagged. Library Clips recently wrote about People tagging. “People tagging is becoming the next logical step in the tagosphere…at the moment most “enterprise people directories” list a fielded profile and a photo, one of the fields will be called interests or specialty, etc… What if you could tag yourself with your interests or areas of expertise, and what if others could also tag you, and likewise you can tag others.”

People tagging could help you find people of similar interests or someone to fill a job or task requirement. The post mentioned that IBM has a working model for a people tagging module that is also incorporated into the people directory, it’s called Fringe Contacts.

Stephen Farrell and Tessa Lau provide a paper on the IBM effort, Fringe Contacts: People-Tagging for the Enterprise. Such as tagging documents can help you keep track of them and their links, tagging people will help you keep track of them. Seems logical to me. I am always forgetting names but if I could search of qualities or attributes, I could more likely find the person whose name I forgot. This should work well for large enterprises like IBM but also for individuals operating in the web.

I heard about this from several sources including Tomoaki Sawada enterprise tagging

Comments

[Michael Angeles]

Hi, Bill. I had a similar idea in 2003 when we were implementing KM blogs for customers and later again when we installed our social bookmarking application at Lucent. I illustrated how the idea of creating friends in a social network could create links to the friends' subject areas of interest by exposing aspects of their information use. Sounds troublesome, but in an enterprise context, exposing information use may be fair game and provide knowledge sharing opportunities.

Of course, one requirement for this to be of value is being able to identify experts (either because they are self-classified or pre-classified as such by a subject matter expert). Here are the blog entries with diagrams and a user interface concept:

* Integrating weblog aggregation data with enterprise data: http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/node/1312/view

* Exposing users' enterprise information systems use for knowledge sharing and social networking: http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/node/1548/view

I really think that there's so much more that can be done with enterprise social networks when information systems are integrated. The problem is getting the right people to buy in to the idea.

[Tomoaki Sawada]

Hi, Bill.
Since you've been mostly knowledgeable of IBM Internal project going on relative to Enterprise Web2.0, this may be of your interest that it summaries research project relative to Collaboraiton Technologies, including Dogear, Fringe Contacts(Bluepages?), SONAR(Social Networking architecture and so on ) at
http://www-5.ibm.com/il/news/events/portal6/downloads/2_HRL_Web2.0.pdf

[jerome]

Can I share some resources with you?