The problem of tag divergence is being addressed by an approach between full on semantic web ontologies and open ended tagging. Actually there are ontologies behind this, they’re just hidden from mortal eyes.

http://www.commontag.org/Home

“Let’s suppose you uploaded some pictures of a trip to New York City to an online account. Do you tag them “New York City,” “NYC,” “newyork,” or all of the above? How do you know your content will be correctly identified and related to other content on the web? And if you come across the tag “Tesla,” how do you know whether it refers to the scientist, the car company, or the band?

According to the Common Tag website, “The Common Tag format was developed to address the current shortcomings of tagging and help everyone – including end users, publishers, and developers – get more out of Web content. With Common Tag, content is tagged with unique, well-defined concepts – everything about New York City is tagged with one concept for New York City and everything about jaguar the animal is tagged with one concept for jaguar the animal. Common Tag also provides access to useful metadata that defines each concept and describes how the concepts relate to one another. For example, metadata for the Barack Obama Common Tag indicates that he’s the President of the United States and that he’s married to Michelle Obama.”

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/common_tag_brings_standards_to_metadata.php

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