Standardsland Tagging Service (Slants)

The information architectures created by information and communication technology (ICT) standards have far-reaching implications for public policy issues such as online privacy, censorship, user and content discrimination, and identity management. Slants is a tool for identifying online resources, such as standards, that have public policy implications. It will build a database of these resources by harvesting relevant RSS feeds from users of the Delicious social bookmarking web service, using an automated classification system and custom thesaurus to identify relevant tag sets that users have assigned to their bookmarks. Slants will then normalize these tags against its own controlled vocabulary and republish the bookmarks to its own Delicious page. The Slants website will provide finding aids specifically adapted to the public policy domain. Users will be able to design custom searchs of the Delicious network by creating tag sets based either on the Slants controlled vocabulary or their own tags. Slants will execute these searchs on a periodic basis, using vocabulary expansion to increase the possibility of matches.