19 th Australasian Conference on Information Systems Collaborative Tagging 3-5 Dec 2008, Christchurch Maier, et al. 607 Collaborative Tagging of Knowledge and Learning Resources Ronald Maier Innsbruck University School of Management University of Innsbruck Innsbruck Austria Email: ronald.maier@uibk.ac.at Silke Retzer School of Information Management Victoria University of Wellington Wellington New Zealand Email: silke.retzer@vuw.ac.nz Stefan Thalmann Innsbruck University School of Management University of Innsbruck Innsbruck Austria Email: stefan.thalmann@uibk.ac.at Abstract. This research paper reports part of a larger international study that employs collaborative tagging for effectively describing knowledge and learning resources (KLR) in an institutionalised setting. The number of these resources has increased enormously within organisations over time and with an increasing variety of quality standards, maturity and granularity of resources, the description of content with metadata becomes more and more challenging. Automatic extraction services and professional metadata authoring tools could not deliver the expected results. Therefore, this research project investigated and discussed collaborative tagging as a means to successfully tag KLR. This paper presents results of an online survey distributed to first-year Information Systems students at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The results report on the study’s key themes of commitment and convergence towards generally accepted collaborative tags. Commitment and convergence could be confirmed, but there is a need for further exploration with a higher number of participants. Collaborative tagging is suggested as a solution to facilitate the development of ontologies for describing organisational metadata. Keywords Collaborative tagging, knowledge and learning resources, metadata, ontologies, online survey. INTRODUCTION Collaborative tagging appears as a key theme and one of the most interesting technical aspects that appeared out of the Web 2.0 area. The idea of collaborative tagging defines the description of resources with keywords, called tags. Later, these tags and tags assigned by other users can be used for searching resources more effectively. “In other words, searching becomes the fundamental method of organisation, and tagging is a way of adding some additional information (sometimes called ‘metadata’) to data objects” (Treese 2006, p16). Besides interactivity, social networking and Web Services, tagging can be seen as a main category of Web 2.0. In addition, collaborative tagging might be able to substitute or complement traditional methods for defining ontologies (Lassila and Hendler 2007). Ontologies represent metadata schemas that provide a controlled vocabulary of concepts (Maedche and Staab 2001). Metadata, in turn, is defined as “data about data” (Berners-Lee 1997). Therefore, metadata can be used for describing other data or resources. Moreover, ontologies can support communication, including the exchange of both semantics and syntax, among people and between machines (Maedche and Staab 2001). Hence, the effective construction of ontologies is significant for the emergence of the Semantic Web, which has the goal of creating machine consumable knowledge (Berners-Lee et al. 2001). The traditional mechanisms for defining ontologies by small expert panels or, more recently, automatic