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…
I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
191–200 of 279 posts
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#192Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#193Instagram'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…
(When oh when will postgres get automatic and incremental materialised views?)
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#194A few months ago I worked on some proof-of-concept code for searching tagged data: https://github.com/aaviator42/Cha I now work full-time in a role where part of my duties is designing a content tagging system and its search functionalities. It's very interesting and fun! Lots of puzzles. How do you weigh different tags? How do you do fuzzy searching ('city' should match with plural ('cities'), misspellings ('citys')…
I see it in this business all the time how people try to reinvent the wheel and end up writing their own search engine, thinking it's just another small in-house project, but they quickly run into the difficult problems like, well, these.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#195A few months ago I worked on some proof-of-concept code for searching tagged data: https://github.com/aaviator42/Cha I now work full-time in a role where part of my duties is designing a content tagging system and its search functionalities. It's very interesting and fun! Lots of puzzles. How do you weigh different tags? How do you do fuzzy searching ('city' should match with plural ('cities'), misspellings ('citys')…
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#196Instagram'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…
Aka the toxic engagement trap. I miss the days when unfathomable AI didn't dictate what's popular.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#197I've done this professionally in a couple different settings, from building topic classifiers for news events (it is sometimes hard to know when one news event should stop and another start) to creating tagging systems for audio recordings of group conversations (where topics often merge in and out of each other, often within a single sentence). I'm currently working on classifying non-speech, non-musical sound and i…
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#198Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#199I 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 strin…
Not having tag hierarchies doesn't fix the difficulty of classification, it just handwaves it away. There will always need to be (super)tags that are collections of other tags, where it is a bug for an item that has a particular tag to not also have another, related tag. The question should be how you're going to handle that, not if you're going to handle it, or you'll end up with a lot of broken tags of dubious usef…
That's precisely the problem. You started with tags and now you are building a knowledge base. You wanted a banana and now you have a gorilla holding a banana and the whole jungle. If you want to build a knowledge base, use links/URIs/ontologies.
You'll find out the moment you add cycles the algorithms get way more intense. And then once you have stronger algos, you want more search power. Next thing you know you are bikeshedding about things like "apple" is both "fruit" and "tech company" so you need tags-of-tags etc. Just build a knowledge base if you need a knowledge base. Otherwise tags are just a way to do faceted search.
They aren't mutually exclusive, either.
OpenTelemetry, for example, has both tags and references.
Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems
#200Anyone 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.
https://www.gpsoft.com.au/help/opus12/index.html#!Documents/...