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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

#271

Post by kixiQu »

mastax wrote: post #249
kixiQu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went and got my laptop to type up a reply to this: Instagram's tagging system was and is atrocious in combination with their discovery mechanisms and the incentives they create. A real example, this has been true for years: I want to look at pictures of Jennifer Lawrence's makeup because she, like me, has hooded eyes and that makes useful reference. I go to instagram imagining that I will find fan accounts posting…

It's funny because one of the most common arguments I see inside Reddit communities is irrelevant posts getting upvoted in a subreddit, and wanting the mods to step in - or not. People just see a post on their frontpage that they like and they upvote it, rarely stopping to look at what subreddit it's from and whether the post is a good fit for that subreddit. I suppose it probably still works better than Instagram.

Fully agreed – it at least seems like you could tune for this in your less deterministic algorithmic sorting, too. There's no Reddit Constitution that says an upvote is an upvote is an upvote – so you could weight upvotes issued from people viewing the subreddits' pages more strongly than those from people viewing their home feeds, upvotes from subscribers' home feeds more strongly than nonsubscribers' /all feeds, etc. etc., downvotes mutatis mutandis

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#272

Post by dredmorbius »

stinkytaco wrote: post #97
pvg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 prett…

Library of Congress classifications and subject headings (those are two separate things, for those unfamiliar) are not perfect, but they're pretty good, apply to a huge copus, and to my mind most importantly, have evolved over a bit over a century under numerous circumstances, including an absolute explosion of published materials, substantial changes to understanding organisation and classification of knowledge, and an awareness of the social and cultural aspects of these (as well as the institutional bias that's often embodied within them). That is, they have evolved a change management process.

The Classifications are substantively hierarchical, though that's really an outgrowth of the fact that they're used to locate books within physical shelf space, in which a record must occupy an address (physical space), and given that the Library's settled on subject classification as its storage and retrieval basis, this maps what's effectively a folded linear structure (shelf space) onto the multidimensional subject classification. It's not ideal, but it's workable. And many of the quirks of the LoCCS come out of the fact that it addresses both the composition (comprehensive, but still US-centred) and process (shelving, search, and retrieval) of the Library.

The Subject Headings are not hierarchical, though they're structured. In particular, they're relational, with numerous subject headings referring to others. There's some parent-child relations (though the top level hierarchy is broad), numerous retired classifications, and many "use that instead of this" notes.

(I've made ... some progress ... at a structured parsing of the subject headings, though that work's been stranded Because Reasons.)

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#273

Post by dredmorbius »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #173
avgcorrection wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Eh, as the librarian who wrote the post you're replying to... I am actually ambivalent. I wish librarianship as a field and industry were more what I'd fantasize it should/could be, but it's not so much.

How so?

What's missing / what would you remove and/or change?

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#274

Post by redbar0n »

endisneigh wrote: post #72

Is there an optimal tagging system, performance wise? Seems like there could be a database just for tagging.

Probably a graph database. Considering graph dbs are optimised for JOINs (doesn't need to do them, due to direct relationships between individual records aka. index-free adjacency). The question is how you would effectively model the tag system in a graph db, as there are several ways to do it.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#276

Post by ChrisKnott »

andrewflnr wrote: post #267
ChrisKnott wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only feature you need to express this is to be able limit a tag to the context of another tag. It's slightly different than a compound tag because each tag can still be used independently. I experimented with a system like this recently[0] that used two different tag notations that seemed to make the mixing more intuitive. I didn't have enough time to iterate on it further or build it more seriously, but…

That introduces a dependency, or at least ordering, between the concepts of Location and Occupation that I'm not sure should exist, much less which direction it should point. It works for baking:skilled because skill level is inherently part of the property of being a baker, and skill is undefined without a thing to be skilled at, whereas someone can easily reside in a location with no occupation ({Location:USA/Occup…

Perhaps I misunderstood the example but I thought the point was precisely that there is a dependency between Occupation and Location which individual tags cannot express...?

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#277

Post by NWoodsman »

didgetmaster wrote: post #188

I created a new kind of object store where tagging is one of its key features. Each data object (called a Didget - short for Data Widget) can have a set of contextual tags attached. This is true whether the Didget holds file data like a photo, a document, or a piece of software; or if it holds other kinds of structured or semi-structured data (relational tables, folders, configuration, etc.). Each defined tag has a d…

Is your design open-source? Do you have an API? Would like to learn/help

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#278

Post by redbar0n »

jon-wood wrote: post #255
feoren wrote: post #168

I'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion of how tags are an entry point into plain-old data architecture. It should be obvious that by the time you're using tags for queries like "start-date: BEFORE 2022-03-01", you've created an inner-platform where you're building a plain-old relational database on top of your tags. Stop what you're doing and elevate "start date" out of tag-land and into a more structured repre…

Relatedly, comments fields are the bane of data compliance exercises. You think you’ve caught everywhere a customer’s information might be stored, and then at the last minute you find out support have been putting phone numbers in the comments field because they had nowhere else to put it.

sounds like a savior!

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#279

Post by redbar0n »

jsemrau wrote: post #129
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.

What made you move away from that "naive" implemeentation? What kind of implementation do you now employ?
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