> I'm sure there are sophisticated ontological systems which would allow users to specify all those different relationships separately. I'm also pretty sure that users would become sloppy after a short time or would disagree which particular relationship to use in a particular situation
I think the problem is allowing users to freely tag, then. There should be easily accessed guidelines about how each tag should be used, and people who are constantly moving them, correcting them, and updating usage guidelines.
We need the ability to implement governance systems on top of web 2.0+ style content systems. People should be able to vote for representatives (with any number of voting systems), create committees, submit changes to be voted on, etc. Instead we usually work based on hierarchical dictatorships or imagined consensus. People need organizational management tools baked into software, because organization of information depends on it. Instead of proposing a new committee to come up with the schema of everything, better tools that enable users to build committees.
The fundamental tension in tagging systems, to me, is whether tagging is a feature the software offers to the user or a task the user performs to assist the software.
In the first case, you want freewheeling and tolerate ontological inconsistencies because you want to offer flexibility to users and will capture hard to quantify emergent benefits (some made up examples: "try the tag user233-favorite, I keep discovering awesome articles!", "the physicist-needed tag has highlighted a lot of misinformation surrounding quantum physics and relativity"). People use it to the extent it is useful.
The other way, with formal semantics, governance (which you made some very wise points about), etc allows the software to reply to queries like "19th-century + Missouri + humorists" in a performant and authoritative way. It's not really a feature so much as it is a way to enable other features.
I think the problem is allowing users to freely tag, then. There should be easily accessed guidelines about how each tag should be used, and people who are constantly moving them, correcting them, and updating usage guidelines.
We need the ability to implement governance systems on top of web 2.0+ style content systems. People should be able to vote for representatives (with any number of voting systems), create committees, submit changes to be voted on, etc. Instead we usually work based on hierarchical dictatorships or imagined consensus. People need organizational management tools baked into software, because organization of information depends on it. Instead of proposing a new committee to come up with the schema of everything, better tools that enable users to build committees.