Problems With Searchable Tagging Systems

Many organizations waste time and money researching answers to questions already answered or creating content that may already have been done by others within the organization. What shortfalls of social tagging does Trant identify that might prohibit a searchable tagging system to be a successful aid within an organization such as a business or school?

In Trant's article, Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy, she concludes that "There is a convern over the relativistic nature of socially created vocabularies, the lack of tern consistency, problems with synonomy and polysemy, and the inherent inconsistency of a user-generated vocabulary". I think this statement describes the shortfalls of social tagging perfectly. There are so many different ways to tag things and multiple words which all mean the same thing. Companies that waste time and money researching answers to the same questions are most likely running into problems because they do not know the exact terms that they need to search with. Words vary between people, cultures, and especially generations and although two people could post the exact same thing, they could tag it completely different. The different tags will give people a very large variety of sites when searching tags.