Tagging and semantics
anand
http://www.davidgalbraith.org/archives/000764.html#000764. Especially,
the last few paragraphs about meta tags caught my eye.
Anyone wants to comment on this ?
PS : This list could be a good place to trash out the road ahead (new
features, plugins etc) for nucleus. Kind of a collaborative brain
storming session.
roel
When you tag an item with a keyword such as "turkey". what you are
implicitly saying is "category=turkey". The problem with this is
that sometimes "category" is not enough context for a tag. Meaning
always requires context. Wists allows you to label the context of a tag
with anything (where the default is implicitly "category"). In the
above example you could label something as "food=turkey" or
"country=turkey". These groups of tags, "metatags" allow you to
indicate the context of a tag and give tags greater meaning and less
ambiguity. Popular metatags that people have already created include
location= for places and fav= for people's favorite movies and books
etc.
By allowing people to create metatags and attaching these metatags to
their own 'namespace' you allow for the possibility of formally
defining groups of metatags as an RSS module for a specific industry.
In theory one can create a marketplace for RSS modules where the people
creating the modules need not know or care about the technicalities of
what this means. In other words if people involved in apartment rentals
start to tags things in the following manner: rooms=3 square_feet=2000
monthly_rent=2000 etc., one has the beginnings of something that could
be formalized as a standard module for apartment rentals with elements
defined in a standard namespace.
It is possible that these early steps in grass roots classification via
tagging could evolve into something more along the lines of what the
original aims of the semantic web promised.</blockquote>
Standardize? Hmmmm. I love tags, tagging, and just doing stuff with
folksonomies. But standardizing is something that will not be done by
people. Just tag away, I say, and let del.icio.us and co do the
automated standardization of tags.
Example: country=turkey is the standardized version. But a set of tags
describing a picture like this:
a. turkey vacation istanbul , or
b. turkey beach summer
...wil indicate that we are talking about the country. No need to
require people to use certain standardized (meta)tags, because machines
can standardize it for us.
One thing I think is very important for tagging is autocompletion. That
stimulates the amount of tags you use to describe an object, an thus
makes it easier for machines to standardize tags.
My 0.02 cents... :-)
Roel
anand
Roel, good points about doing less work. The key to make tagging a
success will be to ensure that the user does as little as possible.
Our plugin already is capable of understanding meta tags. For example,
instead of using the country=turkey format, our plugin uses the
country/turkey format. This hierarchy (i believe) is not supported by
either flickr or del.icio.us .. In del.icio.us. if you tag it with
country/turkey, it will show up only in country/turkey .. not in
country or turkey.
Yup. Auto complete is vital .. I already have something working for
that .. Need to ajaxify it and it will be good to go.
(I think) We may need to support two way hierarchial tags as well,
for example, instead of wondering whether it is nucleus/roel or
roel/nucleus, we must have a way to say nucleus//roel and make it
appear in both ..
Further, if we say nucleus/roel|karma, it should be equivalent to
nucleus/roel,nucleus/karma ..
Just some of the thoughts floating around in my head about tagging!
Anand.
ketsugi
to use) and your tags plugin, I'm not sure that hierachical tagging is
entirely necessary or desirable. While I admit that it does seem to
make sense in an information-structuring sort of way, I also find that
it makes tagging a bit more tedious and not as simple as it should be.
As for autocomplete, I must also say that I prefer the way the
del.icio.us experimental bookmark does it: it has a list of tags that
you've already used, and you can simply click on a tag to add that tag
to the text input. This way:
1. You can see at a glance what tags you've already used, so you don't
generate a similar but differently-named tag because you forgot about
the other one.
2. No typing at all! Just click and go, unless you're adding new tags.