ajft

From the "Not quite the semantic web department" come a semi-standard use of Flickr's machine tags to label images with the genus and species.

For example, my photos of the Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), would be tagged with:

taxonomy:genus=Dacelo
taxonomy:binomial=Dacelo_novaeguineae

Hmm, I wonder if there are other conventions for kingdom, phylum, class, order and family?

References:

• http://pigsonthewing.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/triple-tags-on-twitter/

Continuing the conversation with myself — a possible sign of madness — and answering my own question from above, here are all the semi-standard taxonomy tags for the Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax):

"Aquila audax" "Wedge-tailed Eagle" bird taxonomy:kingdom=Animalia taxonomy:phylum=Chordata "taxonomy:class=Aves" "taxonomy:order=Falconiformes" "taxonomy:family=Accipitridae" "taxonomy:genus=Aquila" "taxonomy:species=audax" "taxonomy:common=Wedge-tailed Eagle" "taxonomy:binomial=Aquila_audax"

A text extract of the Australian bird list from wikipedia, a couple of minutes and a brief perl script and I've got myself a ~/bin/bird-tag that will generate the list of tags.

Not sure what I think of tags. I think they're a poor mans meta-data, for those people to lazy to properly annotate things, or those developers too lazy to develop decent interfaces to allow proper annotation. I've already had a run-in with the multiple possibilities of Victoria, for example. Today I tagged a fotothing foto that had contained a lion, then looked for other lions. I got told that similar tags included dandelion, sealion, and pavilion. Ok, I'll accept the first two, but the third made me nearly splutter my coffee out my nose.