For organizations that first digitize their assets, the initial problem of categorizing and identifying them becomes apparent. This is a time-consuming task requiring expertise and consistency. A digital object that has been incorrectly identified can be lost in the system. For organizations with hundreds of thousands of digital objects, the classification can become an expensive and difficult task to achieve.
The notion of image tagging has been around for some time. This involves a person adding a metatag and using it to identify the digital object (in this case, a tag is just shorthand for metatag). The tag is usually just one characteristic of the digital object and usually not a complete identification of the image (which would include author, security, copyright, and licensing). A tag might be an attribute, which lists all the items in a digital photo, or a set of words, that best describe the digital object.
Adding a tag in this case becomes useful when searching to find...