A Tutorial on Tags for betacell.org

What are tags?

According to Wikipedia, tags are:

A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy.

Source: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

From the perspective of the BCBC website, tags are used as metadata terms to further describe, and categorize, the resources listed within. All registered users (including non-members) can tag resources. Once a resource has been tagged, a user can retrieve their tags, which provides them with a persistent (online) list of tags that can be used to organize information with a personalize semantic context. Furthermore, by looking at the "tag space" from all users, patterns emerge on usage and ideas on resource that may not have been otherwise apparent from traditional data collection and display.

Since tags are also very useful when used by numerous community members, we are currently allowing tags to be publicly visible. However, the underlying resource(s) that the tag is describing remains under the traditional BCBC access control.

Please note that we currently support tags only for our reagent resources (Antibodies, Adenovirus constructs, Mouse strains, and ESC lines). Additional resources will be taggable over time.

Add or edit a tag

To create or manage tags, you must logged in,
From a Resource page (example: Mafa^tm1.1Rwst mouse strain), click on the Edit Tags button in the Resource Tags section,
You can add, or edit/delete previously added tags, from the text field that appears,
Multiple distinct tags should be comma-separated,
Click on Save Tags to save your edits,
Your tags will be displayed on the same page, in the tag list in bold. Non-bolded items are system tags.

Displaying tags

Note: Tags on resource pages are automatically displayed.

Go to the Resource Tags display page at betacell.org/resource/tags,
You can select (1) My tags, (2) All member tags (default view) or (3) System tags,
You can also use the options to view the tags as a tag cloud or as a list, sort alphabetically or by frequency, or limit the size of returned tags by their frequency - all in combination,
To get to the resources that match any tag, click on the tag of interest and a list of resources that were tagged as such will be shown on the right side of the page,
The matching resources are hyperlinked to their respective resource pages.