Triple Tags

[Rob Lewis]

I just discovered something called "Triple Tags". Ever heard of them? (Flickr calls them "machine tags" for some reason.) 

Anyway, it's a structured tagging system wherein each tag has the format namespace:predicate=value. For example: 

flickr:user=straup

geo:locality="san francisco"

geo:long=123.456

A tag can point, say, to an article or blog post like this: 

adactio:post=1245

Web services can retrieve these tags and use them to do interesting things. 

Here's some more information: http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/

Obviously the big benefit is that they can incorporate semantic information, not just dead text. As this guy says here: 

http://adactio.com/journal/1274/

"Machine tags don’t have the low barrier to entry of regular tagging but they aren’t as complex as something like RDF. It might be that they hit the sweet spot between accuracy and ease of use." 

(RDF is Resource Description Framework, the guts behind the much-touted but rarely implemented "semantic web". I think one of the things holding it back is its complexity.) 

I don't know if this will catch on, but it might be interesting if OpenMeta could support it. Of course it's already supported in a sense, due to the fact that a triple tag is just a text string. I guess I'm thinking of something like a little pop-up form with 3 fields that would make it easy to specify the three components (namespace, predicate, and value). And maybe facilities to make searching easier. 

Probably not at the absolute top of the priority list, but it's interesting to think about. Oh, and of course Apple should support it with the Mavericks tagging system too. 

[Tom Andersen]

Rob,

Read your email. Looks promising. We had some support for something like this "Author:andersen" but no real deep support. 

--Tom

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