Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne D. Storey. The implications of how we tag software artifacts: exploring different schemata and metadata for tags. In Web2SE '10: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Web 2.0 for Software Engineering. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2010. [doi]
Social tagging has been adopted by software developers in various contexts from source code to work items and build definitions. While the success of tagging is usually attributed to the simplicity of tags, the implementation details of tagging systems vary significantly in terms of metadata, schemata and semantics. In this position paper, we argue that academia and industry should be aware of these differences and that we should start to examine their implications.