Hi, I’m Don Turnbull – an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. I teach more than a couple of courses related to issues that could revolve around tagging, including a course on what I call Knowledge Management Systems as well as Web Information Retrieval, Evaluation & Design and even about designing information systems from the perspective of Information Architecture & Design.

I’ve also been doing this kind of work in industry, including leading the research efforts at a startup that was acquired by Google. I currently also spend a bit of time consulting with software companies to develop new kinds of information systems as well as with other businesses to collect, manage and retrieve their own information.

I’m interested in tagging and ad-hoc taxonomies for a number of reasons. Primarily, because they seem to be leveraging the power of large numbers in concert with the practical intelligence of normal people, not just automated systems. The advent of user-defined taxonomies or even user-driven world views (let’s call them ontologies for this post), is transforming how we as individuals manage our own information, how we share it with others (like minded or not) and how we can both browse and search through personal and networked resources in a world where tags might just offer the silver bullet of metadata that helps us manage information overload.

I’ll do my best to talk about issues related to all these claims and ideas both here and on my own blog: donturn.com.