Tagmashes

Another Master
I'm trying to unlock the significance of tagmashes. A tagmash builds a sort of subject heading by combining search terms in a folksonomy - and then storing them. So 'joined' search terms become a persistent and useful category. Thingology reports it like this: "there is no good way to search for 'France during wwii.' The tag Vichy covers some of the ground, but not enough. Tagmash provides an answer. Tagmash: france, wwii (france and wwii) Tagmash: france, wwii, non-fiction (kill the novels) Tagmash: france, wwii, -fiction (much the same)." You can see all this working by following the links on the Thingology blog. There's also a commentary on tagmashes here. It seems that clusters, as used in Flickr, do a similar thing but they work on a frequency count, whereas tagmashes are derived from meaningful combinations generated by users. If I've got it right what we have here is a great example of knowledge building in a social network.