Our aim at whiskyTAG is to classify whisky in all its wonderful guises by allowing users to assign freely chosen keywords called tags (can you see where we got the name from?!). This has been called a folksonomy. We encourage users of whiskyTAG to tag any whisky on our system with anything that comes to mind. We hope that in the long run we will be able to build up a picture of a whisky based on what our community says.

One of my favourite whiskies is Laphroaig, and I will (and have already in our test system) tag it with peaty. Assuming that people agree (and I would be amazed if they didn’t) other whiskyTAG users would also tag Laphroaig as peaty.

More excitingly we will also be able to suggest whiskies based on your current favourites. Imagine you like Laphroaig. It makes sense that if you like this you will also like other whiskies that have been tagged as peaty, maybe, Ardbeg, Bowmore, Caol Ila etc etc.

Now knowing that if you like Laphroaig you will also like Caol Ila isn’t ground breaking. But imagine that Laphroaig has 100 or even 1000 different tags describing it. The whiskyTAG algorithms will match these tags with the tags of all the other whiskies and come up with a list of matching whiskies. We hope that this will give some similar whiskies that you would never have thought of.

I’m certainly looking forward to this - I hope you are too.