Taxonomies are not only hard, but impossible. Tagging is hardly better. The problem you run into with tagging is that one day you call them `photos` and the next day you call them `pictures` or `pics` or `photography` or `disneyland trip 2019` or nothing at all, and then the day after that you can't find anything. The only solution is constant maintenance. Organization of non-trivial amounts of information is an ongoing problem, not solvable per se. You can hack out a path through the jungle, but the jungle just keeps growing.
Taxonomy Is Hard
71–80 of 83 posts
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#72Taxonomies are one of the funnest things I have worked with (very limited capacities) in the Wordpress implementation (about 1.5 million indexed pages).
I think spatial datasets/spatial aptitude either makes them relevant or just an untapped avenue for exploration.
Interesting article and most likely part of 21st century technology on many.... levels.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#73Many people here are saying this is a search problem, but actually there are two distinct ways of finding information: search and browse. Unfortunately it is hard to support both without a lot of work.
Sometimes you want to locate a specific item - in which case you need a good way of searching - and sometimes you want to browse through related information so you want to see a hierarchical structure.
Google drive was originally designed on the principle that search was all you needed so it was all tag-based. And it was terrible as soon as you had a lot of data. So google was forced to introduce the ability to create a folder structure.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#74This is not taxonomy, is classification.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#75Taxonomies are not only hard, but impossible. Tagging is hardly better. The problem you run into with tagging is that one day you call them `photos` and the next day you call them `pictures` or `pics` or `photography` or `disneyland trip 2019` or nothing at all, and then the day after that you can't find anything. The only solution is constant maintenance. Organization of non-trivial amounts of information is an ongo…
I think the tagging issue can be solved by a system that gives the user suggestions from what they've entered before, and if they need to create a new rag, it has to be an explicit "create new tag" action so they don't end up with similar tags due to typos "pictures" "Pictures" "Picures"..
But yeah, I can't argue that tagging solves the problem at hand.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#76Taxonomies are not only hard, but impossible. Tagging is hardly better. The problem you run into with tagging is that one day you call them `photos` and the next day you call them `pictures` or `pics` or `photography` or `disneyland trip 2019` or nothing at all, and then the day after that you can't find anything. The only solution is constant maintenance. Organization of non-trivial amounts of information is an ongo…
I think the tagging issue can be solved by a system that gives the user suggestions from what they've entered before, and if they need to create a new rag, it has to be an explicit "create new tag" action so they don't end up with similar tags due to typos "pictures" "Pictures" "Picures".. But yeah, I can't argue that tagging solves the problem at hand.
In practice that doesn't solve the problem as much as you'd expect. Consider two or more people maintaining the same system. You are tagging something, and the tags that first come to your mind don't appear among the suggested ones: is that because you're the first person to ever tag something like this, or is it that you're describing it in a different way than I did last year?
Your options for finding out are:
1. Step back and do some research, look at all the tags and find ones that someone might have used to describe something similar, and then check the original item to make sure.
2. Ask your team if anybody has tagged something like this before.
3. Institute a sort of merge request process for new item tags.
4. Make up a new tag and move on.
Guess which option people usually go with?
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the tagging issue can be solved by a system that gives the user suggestions from what they've entered before, and if they need to create a new rag, it has to be an explicit "create new tag" action so they don't end up with similar tags due to typos "pictures" "Pictures" "Picures".. But yeah, I can't argue that tagging solves the problem at hand.
In practice that doesn't solve the problem as much as you'd expect. Consider two or more people maintaining the same system. You are tagging something, and the tags that first come to your mind don't appear among the suggested ones: is that because you're the first person to ever tag something like this, or is it that you're describing it in a different way than I did last year? Your options for finding out are: 1. S…
I wonder whether language models could be used to solve this problem. Convert every tag to a latent space vector and show the user all of the closest existing tags in a dropdown with the option to create a new one at the bottom.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
In practice that doesn't solve the problem as much as you'd expect. Consider two or more people maintaining the same system. You are tagging something, and the tags that first come to your mind don't appear among the suggested ones: is that because you're the first person to ever tag something like this, or is it that you're describing it in a different way than I did last year? Your options for finding out are: 1. S…
I wonder whether language models could be used to solve this problem. Convert every tag to a latent space vector and show the user all of the closest existing tags in a dropdown with the option to create a new one at the bottom.
That would be a cool tool to have. In the end, it still comes down to humans being conscientious every time they add something to the library. The equivalent would be having really nice software development lifecycle processes: test suites, merge request gating, etc, and once in a while (ha ha) people still manage to push out half-baked changes when they're in a hurry. In the end it's a human issue, tools only do so much. And in domains outside of coding, it's harder to find regressions automatically, so they tend to go uncaught and accumulate.
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#79This 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, h…
Here are the links to my own replies again, with all the broken links repaired:
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...
Sorry about the breakage!
Re: Taxonomy Is Hard
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder whether language models could be used to solve this problem. Convert every tag to a latent space vector and show the user all of the closest existing tags in a dropdown with the option to create a new one at the bottom.
That would be a cool tool to have. In the end, it still comes down to humans being conscientious every time they add something to the library. The equivalent would be having really nice software development lifecycle processes: test suites, merge request gating, etc, and once in a while (ha ha) people still manage to push out half-baked changes when they're in a hurry. In the end it's a human issue, tools only do so…
Taking this a bit further, do we actually need “tags” that are identical? Rather than filter by a tag, perhaps you could enter a label or set of labels and sort by which results minimize a distance function in latent space. No matching or conscientiousness necessary.