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I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

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Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#91

Post by lofatdairy »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #14

> I can't find anything on how to design and implement anymore more than the barebones basics of a system. All of this stuff (horse/horses etc) is extensively discussed, maybe look under "taxonomy" or "ontology". Now, whether you want to use any of those solutions or not or find the discussion useful or not... if you aren't finding anything about it at all, you aren't looking in the right places. (I learned about it…

To be fair to OP, the biggest hurdle in learning anything is knowing what questions to ask. When you don't have ontology as part of your vocabulary it's hard to find literature regarding, say, "comparison of ontologies for user-generated text content".

I suppose this flows back into library science, which is all about systematizing where to look for answers to questions, but I'm always astonished to find that there's oceans of literature and research in questions I haven't even thought to ask.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#93

Post by Tomte »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #61
at_a_remove wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will paraphrase this to avoid a callout, but "no regenerating limbs those arms are toast sorry QA despises them" is not a useful tag . (This is a mild example, I've seen far worse) First, it is a single-use tag. Tags are for categories , not solo entries. Solo entries explode the tagspace to no good end. Second, that expression belongs in the summation of the work, or just about anywhere else. Tags are for other pe…

I think you're missing the point that, in AO3 specifically, tags are not solely metadata. Tags are also artistic expression in the context of AO3 . That's the thing. AO3 doesn't function like the Library of Congress, and there are no librarians that are independently assigning categories to fanfic. An author can choose to opt out of tags entirely, and people cannot put tags on other people's fanfic even if it's relev…

> Tags are also artistic expression in the context of AO3.

Seems to be similar on Tumblr.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#95

Post by hwayne »

counttheforks wrote: post #13

Anyone have a suggestion for a tagging filesystem that is maintained? Or if not a filesystem, something that at least works? I still feel like this is the best way to organize personal photos and media, and while https://www.tagsistant.net/ is pretty good it hasn't been updated in 6 years and is fairly buggy.

I just gave up and mimicked tags with symlinks and subfolders. ie "foo" is tagged "todo" if there's a symlink to it in "Tags/todo/".

It works surprisingly well, since I can manage it with standard shell scripting.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#96

Post by crazygringo »

xg15 wrote: post #82

I worked with the Wikipedia category system a few years ago, and you could see the problems with hierarchical tagging systems right in action back then. (Though it may have gotten better in the meantime) The system appeared simple: There were just two relations, "Article A is a member of category B" and "Category X is a subcategory of category Y". However, in practice, the community was using this system to represent…

I encountered the same problem a few years ago and indeed realized that using categories to understand what type of article a thing was (person? subject? event?) was utterly useless, for the reasons you describe.

On the other hand, I discovered that infoboxes (the data in the top-right box on most pages) was generally extremely reliable, if frustrating to parse.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#97

Post by stinkytaco »

pvg wrote: post #74
jrochkind1 wrote: post #14

> I can't find anything on how to design and implement anymore more than the barebones basics of a system. All of this stuff (horse/horses etc) is extensively discussed, maybe look under "taxonomy" or "ontology". Now, whether you want to use any of those solutions or not or find the discussion useful or not... if you aren't finding anything about it at all, you aren't looking in the right places. (I learned about it…

(I learned about it in librarian school) As the rest of us learned during the first tagging boom, the librarian is the natural apex predator of tagging.

I've been a librarian for more than 15 years and I can only speak from personal experience when I say that I am the apex predator of nothing. Every once and a while I will get it in my head to systematize my personal knowledge base with a controlled vocabulary and ontology and I just fall on my face. I really want it for some twisted reason, though.

Turns out LC subject headings -- for all their failures -- are pretty good.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#99

Post by avgcorrection »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #14

> I can't find anything on how to design and implement anymore more than the barebones basics of a system. All of this stuff (horse/horses etc) is extensively discussed, maybe look under "taxonomy" or "ontology". Now, whether you want to use any of those solutions or not or find the discussion useful or not... if you aren't finding anything about it at all, you aren't looking in the right places. (I learned about it…

Librarians are the people that we (technologists) should learn from. But all I see is programmers trying to invent things from first principles.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#100

Post by maxbond »

crazygringo wrote: post #96
xg15 wrote: post #82

I worked with the Wikipedia category system a few years ago, and you could see the problems with hierarchical tagging systems right in action back then. (Though it may have gotten better in the meantime) The system appeared simple: There were just two relations, "Article A is a member of category B" and "Category X is a subcategory of category Y". However, in practice, the community was using this system to represent…

I encountered the same problem a few years ago and indeed realized that using categories to understand what type of article a thing was (person? subject? event?) was utterly useless, for the reasons you describe. On the other hand, I discovered that infoboxes (the data in the top-right box on most pages) was generally extremely reliable, if frustrating to parse.

The infoboxes are created from a query to Wikidata, which you can query yourself! No scraping necessary! https://query.wikidata.org/

You'll want to learn SPARQL, but if you know SQL it's not so bad to pick up.

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