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"In information systems, 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 generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer,depending on the system." (more)

WHAT IS A TAG?

In the Pattern of the Whole, and most places on the internet, a "tag" is a short piece of text, one or a few words, that describe something. Tags are like "keywords" or adjectives/adverbs. They are attributes of something, and tags are used to group things together quickly. The entire content of the Pattern of the Whole is composed of tags you can select, to express your interests or concerns, or to help build alliances for a cause or idea you want to support.

To link projects and surveys and comments into the Pattern of the Whole, begin by building a personal tag list that characterizes everything you are intereted in. You can then use the tags you have selected to organize your interests in ways you can present to others.

The Pattern of the Whole is a library of "drill-down" tags organized in a hierarchical way through a primary set of 12 categories, desending through a series of seven levels. Any two tags can be interconnected.

FROM WIKIPEDIA - MORE ABOUT TAGS
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Labeling and tagging are carried out to perform functions such as aiding in classification, marking ownership, noting boundaries, and indicating online identity. They may take the form of words, images, or other identifying marks. An analogous example of tags in the physical world is museum object tagging. In the organization of information and objects, the use of textual keywords as part of identification and classification long predates computers. However, computer based searching made the use of keywords a rapid way of exploring records.

Online and Internet databases and early websites deployed them as a way for publishers to help users find content. In 2003, the social bookmarking website Delicious provided a way for its users to add "tags" to their bookmarks (as a way to help find them later); Delicious also provided browseable aggregated views of the bookmarks of all users featuring a particular tag. Flickr allowed its users to add their own text tags to each of their pictures, constructing flexible and easy metadata that made the pictures highly searchable.[2] The success of Flickr and the influence of Delicious popularized the concept, and other social software websites – such as YouTube, Technorati, and Last.fm – also implemented tagging. Other traditional and web applications have incorporated the concept such as "Labels" in Gmail and the ability to add and edit tags in iTunes or Winamp.

Tagging has gained wide popularity due to the growth of social networking, photography sharing and bookmarking sites. These sites allow users to create and manage labels (or “tags”) that categorize content using simple keywords. The use of keywords as part of an identification and classification system long predates computers. In the early days of the web keywords meta tags were used by web page designers to tell search engines what the web page was about. Today's tagging takes the meta keywords concept and re-uses it. The users add the tags. The tags are clearly visible, and are themselves links to other items that share that keyword tag.

Knowledge tags are an extension of keyword tags. They were first used by Jumper 2.0, an open source Web 2.0 software platform released by Jumper Networks on 29 September 2008.[4] Jumper 2.0 was the first collaborative search engine platform to use a method of expanded tagging for knowledge capture.

Wikipedia describes our approach
Websites that include tags often display collections of tags as tag clouds. A user's tags are useful both to them and to the larger community of the website's users.

Tags may be a "bottom-up" type of classification, compared to hierarchies, which are "top-down". In a traditional hierarchical system (taxonomy), the designer sets out a limited number of terms to use for classification, and there is one correct way to classify each item. In a tagging system, there are an unlimited number of ways to classify an item, and there is no "wrong" choice. Instead of belonging to one category, an item may have several different tags. Some researchers and applications have experimented with combining structured hierarchy and "flat" tagging to aid in information retrieval.

Pattern of the Whole is a flat (linear/square/rigid/sequential) hierarchy, organized from the top down in one precise descending linear order. This rigidity is required in order to present complex multi-level information on one page. But the tagging system enables a total fluency of interconnection betweeen cataegories, enabling any number of alternative ways to organize or understand the information. This is how we are following the Wikipedia observation that "Some researchers and applications have experimented with combining structured hierarchy and flat tagging to aid in information retrieval."

In research
A researcher may work with a large collection of items (e.g. press quotes, a bibliography, images) in digital form. If he/she wishes to associate each with a small number of themes (e.g. to chapters of a book, or to sub-themes of the overall subject), then a group of tags for these themes can be attached to each of the items in the larger collection. In this way, free form classification allows the author to manage what would otherwise be unwieldy amounts of information. Commercial, as well as some free computer applications are readily available to do this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)