What with del.icio.us and flickr and co, tagging seems to be very, very popular right now. The idea of building something to support tagging of latitude and longitude co-ordinates has been rolling around in my head for a little while, and now a site called tagzania seems to have implemented it. What I’d really like to see is something to calculate nearby items both in terms of real and tag space, but I guess that will come in time.

Another tagging related idea which has been rolling around in my head is requirements analysis. Traceability and maintenance of requirements in software engineering is frequently a problem, particularly in large projects for a number of reasons. One reason is almost certainly the difficulty of identifying exactly which requirements are affected by a certain change, and how requirements are interrelated. The problem with the normal documentation approach is that it only really allows for a single hierarchy. For example, you can group your requirements together by functional groups, or in conceptual groups (say, performance related requirements), but it’s quite difficult to create, and much more difficult to maintain, cross reference lists to create multiple hierarchies.

Treating individual requirements as microcontent items which can then be tagged into multiple hierarchies very simply might well help in these sorts of cases. Obviously all this could be achieved without tagging by pre-designing an appropriate taxonomy and making it simple to link a single requirement to many points in the taxonomy (and no doubt tools for doing this already exist).

The other interesting thing about linking tagging with microcontent requirements would be that it provides a simple mechanism for voting, and then agreeing, on aspects of the project. The customers, for example, could tag certain requirements as being required for some milestone, and that tagging could be accepted by the project team (by adding the tags themselves), or disputed in some appropriate forum. I’m not really sure how the concept of the strength of a tag for an item (i.e. the number of people who tagged it in a certain way) would apply in practice, but I suspect it would be interesting to see in practice.

Anyway, that’s about as far as I’ve thought about it. If I find myself with enough free time and motivation someday, I might try to put something along these lines together as an excuse to play with ruby on rails (or whatever is cool at the time).