Reactive tags: associating behaviour to prescriptive tags

Abstract

Social tagging is one of the hallmarks of Web2.0. The most common role of tags is descriptive. However, tags are being used for other purposes such as to indicate some actions to be conducted on the resource (e.g. 'toread'). This work focuses on 'prescriptive tags' that have associated some implicit behaviour in the user's mind. So far, little support is given for the automation of this "implicit behaviour", more to the point, if this behaviour is outside the tagging site. This paper introduces the notion of 'reactive tags' as a means for tagging to impact sites other than the tagging site itself. The operational semantics of reactive tags is defined through event-condition-action rules. Events are the action of tagging. Conditions check for additional data. Finally, rule's actions might impact someone else's account in a different website. The specification of this behaviour semantics is hidden through a graphical interface that permits users with no programming background to easily associate 'reactions' to the act of tagging. A working system, TABASCO, is presented as proof of concept.