I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
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Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#2A very insightful thread by Hillel Wayne on content tagging systems and their challenges.
Their ubiquitous use (in library and information sciences, and popular social networks like Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest), their deceptive ease of implementation, and "obvious advantages" over hierarchies/folders, means that almost every developer has (or will) run into them at one point or another..
Feel free to comment with good theory and case studies on tagging systems. (It's especially interesting with good case studies for how to model an advanced tag system in a graph database).
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#3A lot of the items described are problems in ontologies
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#4My similar issue is with names in source code.
Fuzzy matching names and interrogating the contributor about the changes being checked in. Questions to ask the contributor, are the names similar to any of these other names? Is there an opportunity to use the same name or are they different concepts?
Code grows and grows and becomes harder to grep if inconsistently naming things.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#5This reminds me of a talk from Clay Shirky about categorization and general ontology. It's interesting to read in hindsight, because it's from when recommendation algorithms were in their infancy.
Warning PDF: https://ia800203.us.archive.org/10/items/Ontology_is_Overrat...
> This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#6No post body was provided.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#7I can't wait for the author of this thread to discover the AO3 tagging system, which is, frankly, a masterpiece that demonstrates how effective community management can lead to extremely good tagging and categorization, with very little miscategorization.
https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-t...
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#8I think tag aliases are fine, but in my opinion, tags should not have hierarchies. That is just opening the can of ontology worms, and most systems are ill-equipped to deal with ontologies...including ontological systems.
Tags are just dumb strings which label data. They are basically KeyValues, where the value is just always equal to True. We don't think of KVs as hierarchical unless they are explicitly a path string, and in that case, they are forced to be a plain tree with no cycles or diamonds.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#9A lot of the items described are problems in ontologies
Yeah. A tag is a predicate. Sub-tags are implication (male author => author). Tag aliases are equivalence (implication in both directions).
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#10I can't wait for the author of this thread to discover the AO3 tagging system, which is, frankly, a masterpiece that demonstrates how effective community management can lead to extremely good tagging and categorization, with very little miscategorization. https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-t... https://archiveofourown.org/faq/tags
> The only system I know that does that is the fanfiction site AO3, where teams of volunteers manually create aliases from, say, "snarry" to "Harry/Snape"
They seem aware already.