I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

Nowadays I nearly always store the assigned tags as an integer array column in Postgres, then use the intarray extension to handle the arbitrary boolean expression searches like “((1|2)&(3)&(！5))”. I still have a tags table that stores all the metadata / hierarchy / rules, but for performance I don’t use a join table. This has solved most of my problems. Supertags just expand to OR statements when I generate the expression. Performance has been excellent even with large tables thanks to pg indexing.

Remaining features to be implemented include in-app audio recording, editing, and custom labeling outside of the main tree structured organizational system.

I'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions if anyone cares to take a look!

[0] https://www.soundseeker.app/

This is an area where large language models have a role to play—whatever you're hoping to achieve with user-generated tags can probably be achieved with ML-powered associations or navigation. And the potential benefit is that it could be tailored to each user—so you're only surfacing "Hot Dogs" when certain users click "Sandwich."

I'm currently working on classifying non-speech, non-musical sound and it can be useful to piggyback on an existing knowledge system, though they tend to be industry-specific. As an example, Google's ontology for sound identification [1] is a nice starting point for general classification, whereas the taxonomy [2] used by the audio post-production industry (sound effects, foley, etc) is structurally quite different (which isn't surprising, but it sure is fun!). From a totally different field (electro-acoustic composition), the work of Michel Chion and Pierre Schaeffer [3] add psychoacoustic elements to more traditional measurable characteristics, i.e. how the sound is perceived and comprehended is just as important as its medium of travel and its source. It is helpful to see what others have done before you so you can pick and choose elements of their work to incorporate into your own.

1: https://github.com/audioset/ontology

2: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b2UhKpcOAE-jd1edOsxC...

3: [big pdf!] https://monoskop.org/images/0/01/Chion_Michel_Guide_To_Sound...

Curious about how this doesn't render the entire system near-useless? In my experience with other sites with user-generated content that allow tagging, this decision always makes the whole system way worse, because the OP alone is almost never going to be aware of all possible tags that are applicable to whatever it is they posted, and will instead just take the first 3-5 words that pop into their head and stick those in the tags field. The end result is a tagging system that barely works; you can search for a tag but you'll miss tons of stuff, and you can filter out a tag but you'll still see tons of stuff in that category. And if you ever find a hyper-specific tag you really enjoy it'll only have like 5 items in it even if there are hundreds or thousands it could be applicable to.

Don't get me wrong, the wiki-style approach of just letting anyone edit tags has its own issues, but it does at least result in tags on everything being at least mostly complete, and actually useful for finding what you want (or filtering out things you don't want).