Tag management is the ability to manage user-generated tags or folksonomy

Folksonomy

A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging...

 within a collaborative software

Collaborative software

Collaborative software is computer software designed to help people involved in a common task achieve goals...

. Tag management features and processes are put in place to encourage cross-user consistency, navigation efficiency and compliance with an existing taxonomy

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...

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Tag management a priori

The tags that users will be able to use can be controlled up-hill by

• Faceted classification
  Faceted classification
  A faceted classification system allows the assignment of multiple classifications to an object, enabling the classifications to be ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a single, predetermined, taxonomic order. A facet comprises "clearly defined, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive...
  
  , categorizing tags in facets (e.g. organization or place facet)
• Predefining tags, authority lists of tags can be created and suggested to users
• Restricting tag creation, allow users to create or not new tags other than predefined tags
• Mandatory facets, meaning a user must categorize each item with at least a tag from this facet
• Relating tags, meaning selecting a tag will also display the results of other tags related to it (e.g. synonyms or translations)

Tag management a posteriori

Tags can be gardened down-hill by

• Renaming tags (e.g. typos)
• Deleting tags
• Moving tags to correct facets (e.g. an organization name)
• Merging tags (e.g. single and plural words)

Examples of tag management

• Tag management applied to blogging tools : Wordpress
  WordPress
  WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...
  
  
• Tag management applied to Content management systems : Microsoft SharePoint
  Microsoft SharePoint
  Microsoft SharePoint is a web application platform developed by Microsoft. First launched in 2001, SharePoint is typically associated with web content management and document management systems, but it is actually a much broader platform of web technologies, capable of being configured into a wide...
  
  
• Tag management applied to Enterprise bookmarking
  Enterprise bookmarking
  Enterprise bookmarking is a method for Enterprise 2.0 users to tag, organize, store, and search bookmarks of both web pages on the Internet and data resources stored in a distributed database or fileserver...
  
   tools : Jumper 2.0
  Jumper 2.0
  Jumper 2.0, is an open source web application script for collaborative search and knowledge management powered by a shared enterprise bookmarking engine that is a fork of KnowledgebasePublisher[]. It was publicly announced on 29 September 2008,...
  
  , Knowledge Plaza
  Knowledge Plaza
  Knowledge Plaza, also referred to as KP, is an Enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management tool which provides a balance between social bookmarking, document management, wikis and an internal social network...