Taxonomy Is Hard • Hacker News Board

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#81

Post by yencabulator » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 12:43 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #39

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…

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".

That argument is much more convincing in the "open world" of internet searches, where enumerating all results is simply not going to happen.

In the scenario where you're searching for a file in a group of low-hundreds of files, it's nothing but a bad cop-out excuse.

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#82

Post by yencabulator » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 12:48 AM UTC

karaterobot wrote: post #71

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 ongo…

One thing I've done ever since the days of del.icio.us is look for the tags that have the fewest matches -- most often they were typos, synonyms, or singular/plural confusion.

Re: Taxonomy Is Hard

#83

Post by Self-Perfection » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 11:32 AM UTC

> Linux is still in the stone age when it comes to tagging. Common Linux filesystems (including ext4 & ZFS) support extended attributes, but I'm not aware of any Linux distro or file manager that includes tagging features based on them (or embedded metadata, for that matter).

KDE has decent support of tags in extended attributes. Tags are shown and can be edited in Dolphin (file manager), gets indexed by baloo. This is far from stone age as author claims!