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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

#121

Post by pessimizer »

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'm sure there are sophisticated ontological systems which would allow users to specify all those different relationships separately. I'm also pretty sure that users would become sloppy after a short time or would disagree which particular relationship to use in a particular situation

I think the problem is allowing users to freely tag, then. There should be easily accessed guidelines about how each tag should be used, and people who are constantly moving them, correcting them, and updating usage guidelines.

We need the ability to implement governance systems on top of web 2.0+ style content systems. People should be able to vote for representatives (with any number of voting systems), create committees, submit changes to be voted on, etc. Instead we usually work based on hierarchical dictatorships or imagined consensus. People need organizational management tools baked into software, because organization of information depends on it. Instead of proposing a new committee to come up with the schema of everything, better tools that enable users to build committees.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#122

Post by skyde »

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…

("Occupations" -> "Writers") seem wrong why would you do this? same for ("Categories with more than 100 entries" -> "Writers").

This seems like trying to put tag on category entity instead of creating a tag hierarchy.

Those 2 should be stored using different relationship type mechanisms.

("categoryTag", , )

ex: ("categoryTag", "Occupations", "Writers")

and

("parentTag",, )

ex: (("parentTag", "American writers" , "19th century American writers")

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#123

Post by justinpage »

dahdum wrote: post #71

I adore tagging systems and have worked on them in several different applications and implementations, but there are always pitfalls and trade offs, and it’s possible to bury yourself 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…

Would you mind sharing a simple example that demonstrates this? Sounds great!

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#124

Post by srcreigh »

dahdum wrote: post #71

I adore tagging systems and have worked on them in several different applications and implementations, but there are always pitfalls and trade offs, and it’s possible to bury yourself 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…

Do you index arrays? What index type is that? Any tips?

I’ve used array column in PG before, haven’t indexed arrays though.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#125

Post by leksak »

errantmind wrote: post #110

Instagram's tagging system was actually really effective at categorizing content and discovery because each hashtag was treated as a node in a (giant) graph, where each node has multiple properties, including post count (number of posts using a tag), 'velocity' (number of posts using a particular tag per unit time), etc. I could write up a big post about it as I made a study of it in when I created a web app for find…

Please write that big post! Sounds interesting

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#126

Post by xg15 »

skyde wrote: post #122
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…

("Occupations" -> "Writers") seem wrong why would you do this? same for ("Categories with more than 100 entries" -> "Writers"). This seems like trying to put tag on category entity instead of creating a tag hierarchy. Those 2 should be stored using different relationship type mechanisms. ("categoryTag", , ) ex: ("categoryTag", "Occupations", "Writers") and ("parentTag", , ) ex: (("parentTag", "American writers" , "19…

Indeed. It's a bit like if a programming language was trying to represent base classes and meta classes using the same mechanism.

My guess is that no one realized the need for "meta" categories when the system was implemented, so later the existing hierarchy was simply co-opted instead of implementing a new functionality for that use case.

As long as the categories are only used by human editors and use is only within some small subcommunity, it can work quite well. The problem starts if you want to combine categories used by different communities or if you (or your program) lack the domain knowledge to understand which nodes represent "meta" categories.

As another poster said, the better approach to use Wikipedia data for automated processing is using infoboxea or the explicitly machine-readable Wikidata repository. The category system looks machine-readable on first glance but really isn't.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#129

Post by jsemrau »

roberthahn wrote: post #113

I'm so happy to see people talk about this! I too am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems. Hillel's thoughts are completely unsurprising to me so I guess I've come to similar conclusions. I do notice that we seem to care about different things though - where Hillel appears to focus on tag types (and the implementation challenges that go with that) I focus more on human factors like what problem are we so…

> I could use might be recommendation engines. Assume I have a database of tags (a tag cloud?), and I know you have similar interests to me. If you also have a tag cloud

This was the first "naive" implementation on finclout. Every post get automatically scanned for ranked keywords and then matched with other known entities about the post. We also user collect tags from the user and have users verify keyword matches.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#130

Post by joshu »

milesskorpen wrote: post #50
joshu wrote: post #42

there's a massive difference between tagging-for-self-recall and tagging-for-other-recall. when i invented tagging the first was paramount, but the latter has become dominant and has very different design considerations one interesting note: you can infer a bunch of hierarchical information since people frequently tag from broader to more specific, topicwise. some things can be tagged by multiple people and you can t…

"When I invited tagging" is such a flex. But creating delicious gives you some credible claims there.

I don't get to use it much these days
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