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Collaborative vocabulary, or collabulary, could make online content into a much more accessible repository by virtue of standardizing how content is tagged by its users.

PreFound and its CEO, Steve Mansfield, approach the issue of organizing content from a tag-based perspective. They have implemented a way to perform automatic tagging of links or groups in the PreFound site from that shared collabulary.

The method simplifies the tagging approach, which PreFound claimed is affected in a negative way by how people tag their content now:

...by not using enough or relevant tags; and by tagging the same links using vastly different tag words. For example, a link about "horses" may be tagged with "equine," "saddles," "mares," "foals," etc. In fact, it should be tagged as simply "horses."

To overcome these problems, PreFound.com crawls the web sites that users are indicating they would like to share, automatically adds tags based on site content, and then runs the site through a process much like a "reverse thesaurus" which reduces large numbers of synonyms into single "collabulary" words.
PreFound has an interesting viewpoint on tagging. They consider using a word from the title of a page as a tag to be very important, but in their observation most people don't do this.

As the site's engine crawls pages to be tagged by users, it pre-tags the links "with keywords that are consistent and relate to a consistent taxonomy." PreFound users can edit these choices for accuracy, but the company feels this approach will lead to better tagging of content.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.