Taxonomy Is Hard • Hacker News Board

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#31

Post by maratc » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:07 PM UTC

jck wrote: post #12

qwerty456127 wrote: post #4

Taxonomy 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?

"Label" — if I understand GP's point — is just a random string you attach to an item. "Amsterdam" could be a label, and it can be attached to a PDF of an old map of the city of Amsterdam, to a photo of your neighbor's dog named Amsterdam, or to an expense report for the project you're building on Amsterdam street. You decide what to attach it to, and it's only important what "Amsterdam" means to you. The search for "Amsterdam" label would bring you all of the above.

"Tag" — if I understand GP's point — implies some structure. In the above examples, it would rather be "ByLocation::Planet Earth::Europe::Netherlands::Amsterdam", "BySubject::Animals::Dogs::Amsterdam(MyNeighborsDog)", and "MyProjects::ByYear::2021::ProjectOnAmsterdamStreet" — or similar. In this case, if you're interested in the neighbor's dog, you're searching by its specific tag, or — if you don't remember its name — a search for "BySubject::Animals::Dogs" might help you. Any such search will also keep the other "Amsterdam" results away.

The problem with tags is how exactly do you implement them. Your project on Amsterdam street may have begun in 2021, but still ongoing in 2022 with no end in sight; or you may have forgotten its dates at all. Additionally, "MyProjects::ByLocation::MyCity::AmsterdamStreet" is not an invalid way to tag that project.

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#32

Post by bambax » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:13 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30

bambax wrote: post #6

All 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…

> it's still incredibly hard to search for a file or its contents effectively. Underappreciated aspect of this is trust . As much as "taxonomy is mostly a search problem", search is in large part a trust problem - trust that the search was done exhaustively, and if it returned no results, it means there aren't any. This is a problem that IMO most offerings are blind to. One big offender for me is Windows Explorer. It…

> because it conflicts with the major thing vendors want

Maybe, but that doesn't explain why there are no startups on the case, that wouldn't have this conflict of interest.

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#33

Post by johnwalkr » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:14 PM UTC

drsopp wrote: post #10

I store my files chronologically. Every time I want to store something I want to keep, I make a folder with the name format "2022-11-01 something something". The text here is just a short description in natural language. If I feel like it I add a tag here like invoice or photos. The point is to make it searchable. I easily find most things I am looking for with Directory Opus and Recoll.

I use this simple system too, except for media. Everything else goes in a new folder inside my "2022" folder.

I tried for a few years to store things in a more hierarchical way or use tags, but it was too much mental effort to think about it every time. I also tried something similar to symlinks when google drive used to support putting files in multiple locations, and it was surprising how confusing it was to manage. Unless you apply symlinks or tags in a very consistent way, it just ends up being frustrating finding something that you think tagged or linked in one way but actually, you tagged it in another way or forgot to tag it at all.

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#34

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #32

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's still incredibly hard to search for a file or its contents effectively. Underappreciated aspect of this is trust . As much as "taxonomy is mostly a search problem", search is in large part a trust problem - trust that the search was done exhaustively, and if it returned no results, it means there aren't any. This is a problem that IMO most offerings are blind to. One big offender for me is Windows Explorer. It…

> because it conflicts with the major thing vendors want Maybe, but that doesn't explain why there are no startups on the case, that wouldn't have this conflict of interest.

Who would fund those, and where's the potential for outsized growth?

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#35

Post by bambax » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:22 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #34

bambax wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it conflicts with the major thing vendors want Maybe, but that doesn't explain why there are no startups on the case, that wouldn't have this conflict of interest.

Who would fund those, and where's the potential for outsized growth?

I think the problem is there's no demand, not that incumbents are fighting it. But I also think it's weird and a mystery that nobody wants good search.

The trust issue you mention may be a clue.

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#36

Post by bambax » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

nobrains wrote: post #24

Tagging, seems like a solution. But isn't. Specific problems with tagging: - Need to tag every file (whereas in folders, you just navigate to the folder and everything you store there is in that folder) - Takes too long - Too much thinking overhead (at the time of storing) - To be effective have to enter the name for all tag entries (e.g. project, type, etc.). If anything is missed for a file, that file will never be…

Maybe automatic tagging with the help of some kind of AI would work?

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#37

Post by talkingtab » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #5

Tagging and categorizing are two subtly different things to do. Having dealt with a lot of real world data, all I can say is that getting your hands on consistently tagged or categorized data is hard and gets harder the more data sources you have. A real world example of how tagging can be both super useful and get out of hand is open street maps. The only meta data allowed in there are tags. The OSM community depend…

My thinking is that categorization is a dead horse. Here is a problem: take a car and a truck. Now slowly, bit by bit, morph the car into the truck. At what point is the car a truck? Or is it ever a truck? I, personally, personally cannot see this as a problem that can be solved. Maybe you are better.

My conclusion is that composition is a better method. Has a. And composition by capability is even better. Not great, but better. I was part of several efforts by standards groups to come up with SNMP standards for storage devices. What is a disk? And it has a controller right. Wait. Now the controller is in the disk. Wait now there are RAID systems. Wait...

Trying to build a system of composable tags for functionality seems like it might have a chance. Can it store something? Can it retrieve it. Does it have a retrieval time? Etc.

Another annoying problem is the categories for Craiglist. Where do cooking pots and pans go. For sale. A locality. Household items. Really? Nothing under cooking or even kitchen? I'm not saying this is wrong, I'm just thinking about how do I go about finding stuff other than just "search title".

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#38

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #32

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's still incredibly hard to search for a file or its contents effectively. Underappreciated aspect of this is trust . As much as "taxonomy is mostly a search problem", search is in large part a trust problem - trust that the search was done exhaustively, and if it returned no results, it means there aren't any. This is a problem that IMO most offerings are blind to. One big offender for me is Windows Explorer. It…

> because it conflicts with the major thing vendors want Maybe, but that doesn't explain why there are no startups on the case, that wouldn't have this conflict of interest.

You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to build a personal search engine on top of Lucene or Elasticsearch and on one level it isn't. But there are two very hard problems.

(1) Performance. Back in the day people frequently turned full text indexing on Windows off because it would slow down their computer too much. People won't be happy with the overheard of a search engine that is always scanning 10's of GBs of document.

(2) Search quality. People are familiar with Google being an effective search engine but they've certainly tried a number with terrible relevance scoring and probably learnt that it is not worth trying the search on a web site or the search on the help of an application. In the case of Elasticsearch the default similarity is BM25 but that has two tunable parameters. There are other similarities you could use but most of them have tunable parameters. It makes a real difference what you choice and there is a methodology for tuning them that is now built into ElasticSearch.

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

I talked to about 20 vendors of full text search products and found that only 2 out of the list regularly evaluated the quality of the results, 1 of them just did it so they could get some advertising by being on the TREC leaderboard. They told over and over again that customers didn't care about search quality, they just wanted to see a list of 350+ data sources that the product could index.

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#39

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30

bambax wrote: post #6

All 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…

> it's still incredibly hard to search for a file or its contents effectively. Underappreciated aspect of this is trust . As much as "taxonomy is mostly a search problem", search is in large part a trust problem - trust that the search was done exhaustively, and if it returned no results, it means there aren't any. This is a problem that IMO most offerings are blind to. One big offender for me is Windows Explorer. It…

I think what you're describing is database query, not search. Heuristic search is going to be non-exhaustive by definition.

Desktop-focused databases are of course widely available (Paradox, Access, LibreOffice Base etc.) but the volume of data you could manage with them is of course limited. I.e. non-toy datasets will naturally be hosted on some sort of "cloud".

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#40

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Nov 01, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #35

TeMPOraL wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would fund those, and where's the potential for outsized growth?

I think the problem is there's no demand, not that incumbents are fighting it. But I also think it's weird and a mystery that nobody wants good search. The trust issue you mention may be a clue.

There isn't even an open source product with traction.