Technical Issue Help : redundant tags

Not sure what the forum protocols are on pinging old posts, but this is still a problem. There are often sets of tags that have exactly the same meaning, separated only by differing punctuation (e.g. ... [More] static_anaysis, static+analysis). You can have a folksonomy with synonyms, and a folksonomy with canonical synonyms aren't controlled vocabularies, as they still allow the creation and use of non-pre-defined terms. They can still be used as a controlled vocabulary, if there is a good reason to do that. Keeping the non-canonical synonyms allows a full folksonomy, and an API could allow the optional exclusion or inclusion of synonyms, or non-canonical terms. I you wanted to be really nifty, you could allow users to suggest synonyms, and use the number of suggestions per pair as a proxy for synonym strength, which would allow for more fine-grained calculation of things like project similarity. BTW, there is a similar discussion at https://www.ohloh.net/forums/3491/topics/955 [Less]