Preferably whatever web server you use will allow you to assign sections to multiple categories. I agree project based is usually the way to go though.
Taxonomy Is Hard
11–20 of 83 posts
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#12Taxonomy is a demon which separates people into perfectionists and non-perfectionists just before dragging both the kinds to hell of exceptions, weird relations and impractical location. Perfectionists get stuck spending infinite amounts of time engineering the taxonomy, non-perfections face the quirks later. Tags are better but can turn out to be even harder (for similar reasons, amplified combinatorially). Labels a…
How are "labels" different from tags?
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#13This dicussion crops up every so often, eg. at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29141800 . Here I repost a composite of my old comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14542595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14546682 from a previous occasion when this was discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14537650 . Anyone who is serious about this stuff should probably start here.
> Well, since you ask, here's Hans Reiser's old stuff:
https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Future_Vision
https://reiser4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/V4
(and http://lwn.net/2001/1108/a/reiser4-transaction.php3 )
. And here's some emails etc. I wrote in response:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040728044342/http://www.st-and...
https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=111624697710426
https://www.mail-archive.com/reiserfs-list@namesys.com/msg09...
https://www.mail-archive.com/reiserfs-list@namesys.com/msg20...
https://www.mail-archive.com/reiserfs-list@namesys.com/msg20...
https://www.mail-archive.com/reiserfs-list@namesys.com/msg20...
https://www.mail-archive.com/reiserfs-list@namesys.com/msg20...
, plus some of the discussion threaded from those posts. (Sorry, my stuff needs rewriting and updating but I'm not in the position to do it at present. If there's anything you would like to ask about please do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9809041 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548477 touch on things that are a bit further down the line, but related—in particular, to the handling of "internal metadata" and files with a compound internal structure.)
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#14Taxonomies are a crutch that simplify a complex problem - usually too much to be useful.
Multidimensional latent spaces based on content and other characteristics of the object is the real solution here.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#15Taxonomy is a demon which separates people into perfectionists and non-perfectionists just before dragging both the kinds to hell of exceptions, weird relations and impractical location. Perfectionists get stuck spending infinite amounts of time engineering the taxonomy, non-perfections face the quirks later. Tags are better but can turn out to be even harder (for similar reasons, amplified combinatorially). Labels a…
How are "labels" different from tags?
You don't care about how they (individual labels) relate to each-other.
E.g. the "javascript" tag implies the "programming" tag. I can even speculate there probably is a trait (linguists may suggest) which applies to some programming languages as well as to some spoken languages. This way tagging arguably can become even harder than taxonomy.
While a label is just a label.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#16Taxonomies are a crutch that simplify a complex problem - usually too much to be useful. Multidimensional latent spaces based on content and other characteristics of the object is the real solution here.
So... tags with magnitude?
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#17All true. Taxonomy is indeed hard. But, does it actually matter? It seems what matters is not how files are stored/organized, but how one can find the files one is looking for. Taxonomy is mostly a search problem. Yet, although one is usually capable of remembering specific or unique details about a file, it's still incredibly hard to search for a file or its contents effectively. Dropbox, to pick just one example, d…
MacOS and Windows got built in search around 15 years ago. Anything more advanced would be very niche, so there's probably no market left.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#18Well, if symlinks seem inelegant, there are hard links as well, you know. Ultimate tag system: for each tag, make a directory with corresponding name, fill with hard links to appropriate files stored in one big directory of mud. Of course, it all have to fit into a single disk drive, and actually deleting a file is difficult but hey, that must be easily solvable, details are left as an exercise for the reader.
That's what I was thinking, too. Maybe also add some content-addressability or timestamp IDs into the mix to make renaming a safe operation. And just FYI: there is a reason why Git puts objects in subdirectories. Filesystem-based operating systems are surprisingly bad at handling extreme filesystems, so it might be wise to do what Git does in the main directory.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#19Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#20Nice article. As a data hoarder this is something I've run into several times over the years. Still haven't found a great solution. If xattrs were more universally supported, then that would probably be the best solution. Instead, I've come to specialized solutions for different data types.
For research papers (in PDF), I have a half-baked python solution I wrote myself that cobbles together the cermine pdf parser/content extractor, the whoosh full text search engine, and an ncurses-based interface.
For personal images, I use the elodie CLI tool, but I'd like to move away from it as I don't like how it modifies files by embedding metadata in them. For research/computer vision data, I use custom tooling based on sidecar files and a pg database kept in sync with the sidecars . For audio samples, I just use a commercial solution, sononym, that uses an sqlite database.
For other miscellaneous use cases, I've also used TMSU. Pretty nice as a more general purpose solution, except for the inherent issues mentioned by the article.
So yeah, I agree it's a hard problem.