The tags page is an essential map of what your community is, and is not, about.
The general outline of Open Data's tag landscape right now:
Count TagName Body
----- ---------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
155 data-request Indicates a hunt for relevant data sources that already are or could be turned into Open Data.
73 usa Use for questions related to the United States of America or regions within it.
44 government For questions about government-related datasets. If relevant, please also specify the country in a separate tag.
40 api Application Programming Interface. An interface designed to be queried programmatically.
31 releasing-data The act of making data available for others to use. The question might cover legal or technical implications of releasing Open Data.
26 data.gov Data.gov provides hundreds of thousands of U.S. government datasets and increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use these datasets. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets. An Open Government initiative for the White House, Data.gov has resources for developers and businesses, and access to local data as well.
25 tool-request Indicates a hunt for tools to create or manage Open Data.
24 best-practice Best-practice questions generally involve a short guide or tutorial related to an outstanding example of the use or implementation of Open Data principles or practices.
15 city
14 maps A visual representation of an area-a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes.
14 census A comprehensive count of the population.
12 geospatial Geospatial pertains to the geographic location and characteristics of natural or constructed features and boundaries on, above, or below the Earth's surface, particularly referring to data that is geographic and spatial in nature.
12 linked-data Linked data is data which itself can be referenced to via a URI and links to other data using their URI's.
12 file-format For questions regarding file-level packaging of data being discussed, such as comparison of multiple file formats or recommendations of a format.
10 gis A geographic information system (GIS), geographical information system, or geospatial information system is any system that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that are linked to location(s). In the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography, statistical analysis, and database technology.
10 wikipedia Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. `enter preformatted text here`
As I see it, there are several classes of tags:
- Requests (data, APIs, tools, etc.)
- Data domains (usa, government, data.gov, city, etc.)
- Subject areas (maps, census, geospatial, gis, etc.)
- Process (releasing data, best practice, file format, etc.)
That's not a bad description of what the site seems to be about, but the tags are disorganized. For instance, it's none too clear how questions are divided among map, geospatial, and gis. I suspect they should be synonyms in the context of this site.
When I looked at the recent sample of questions, it struck me that many of them are undertagged. Take, for instance, Congressional Record in electronic form, which is tagged documentation. It seems to me that it's a data-request for usa government legislation. It might also be asking for history and database, but those are ambiguous tags so I can't be sure.
Tagging is the canonical example of a folksonomy, but that doesn't mean we can't define some guiding principles. How should tags be applied on Open Data?
