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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

#201

Post by kortex »

goto11 wrote: post #41
kortex wrote: post #8

I think tag aliases are fine, but in my opinion, tags should not have hierarchies. That is just opening the can of ontology worms, and most systems are ill-equipped to deal with ontologies...including ontological systems. Tags are just dumb strings which label data. They are basically KeyValues, where the value is just always equal to True. We don't think of KVs as hierarchical unless they are explicitly a path strin…

> They are basically KeyValues, where the value is just always equal to True That would be a set of values :-)

Sure, but my point was there that it's really easy to use KVs as a backing store for tags, which you can implement anywhere and easily serialize. Sets, if you have to do something like transform it to JSON, you have a choice to make: dict:true, or list.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#202

Post by kixiQu »

errantmind wrote: post #110

Instagram's tagging system was actually really effective at categorizing content and discovery because each hashtag was treated as a node in a (giant) graph, where each node has multiple properties, including post count (number of posts using a tag), 'velocity' (number of posts using a particular tag per unit time), etc. I could write up a big post about it as I made a study of it in when I created a web app for find…

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 pictures. I search for #jenniferlawrence. 2.8 million posts. Nice.

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/jenniferlawrence/

Only three of the top nine pictures present there today (same on mobile for me) are of Jennifer Lawrence.

This is what happens when all the engagement is counted in one big engagement bucket, all eyeballs are equal eyeballs, and all likes are equal likes. There are two gorgeous pictures of Anne Hathaway here, and I'm sure they've gotten great engagement, but they are absolute shit at being pictures of Jennifer Lawrence. So now I have to scroll through a ton of absolutely irrelevant nonsense – with attendant ads, let's not forget the ads – if I actually want to use this tag for its sole raison d'etre.

For contrast, consider what happens when a picture is cross-posted on Reddit. If I upvote it in one subreddit, I am giving an engagement signal specific to that subreddit – and I as one user may choose to downvote that same picture in another if I think it doesn't fit there!

This isn't limited to low-effort reposting of professional photographers' work. It happens in less egregious ways for many, many tags in many areas I've seen on IG for quite a few years now (though I can't speak for the whole history of the app). Artists tagging media they're not using, etc. etc.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#204

Post by errantmind »

kixiQu wrote: post #202
errantmind wrote: post #110

Instagram's tagging system was actually really effective at categorizing content and discovery because each hashtag was treated as a node in a (giant) graph, where each node has multiple properties, including post count (number of posts using a tag), 'velocity' (number of posts using a particular tag per unit time), etc. I could write up a big post about it as I made a study of it in when I created a web app for find…

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…

Isolated hashtags on IG were often not useful for finding specific content. To find what you want you'd need an interface to a page that showed posts across multiple hashtags which they didn't provide.

For example, posts that contain both #jenniferlawrence and #hoodedeyes would be what you are looking for, and if you interacted with enough posts containing both of those tags you would end up seeing the content you want, you just can't do it directly by navigating to those hashtag pages individually.

I used to provide this in my free hashtag suggestion app (which I kept online because it was, IMO, the best at what it did and still gets 500k hits a month). The app allows users to iteratively navigate the hashtag graph to a final set of tightly related tags. Anyway, during this refinement process users would see a grid of post thumbnails where the posts contain the desired hashtags. Facebook eventually tightened access to IGs API and blocked my ability to provide this thumbnail grid, but the rest of the app is still standing

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#205

Post by maoeurk »

I've been wanting to make a datalog tagging system for a few things for a while now but don't have the energy to actually do it. Essentially the idea is to encode relationships allowing for very specific queries like: "show me pictures of a person wearing a green hat looking at another person" which is not something most tagging systems could reasonably do.

Breaking that down, that'd be something like:

  wearing(person1, hat), is_hat(hat), is_green(hat), is_person(person1), is_person(person2), looking_at(person1, person2).
I wanted to apply this to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu videos to be able to find very specific queries like, "matches where player 1 gets a takedown, gets swept by player 2, and player 2 wins by submission". A sufficiently well tagged data set would let you find specific stories and sequences of events in a way that I don't think a non-computational query system could do.

Most of the effort and value around a system like this would be building a community of people to tag the data and tools to make that tagging easy... and perhaps a more user friendly query UI.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#206

Post by [deleted] »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #186
xg15 wrote: post #82

I worked with the Wikipedia category system a few years ago, and you could see the problems with hierarchical tagging systems right in action back then. (Though it may have gotten better in the meantime) The system appeared simple: There were just two relations, "Article A is a member of category B" and "Category X is a subcategory of category Y". However, in practice, the community was using this system to represent…

> Categories with more than 100 entries" might have a child "Categories with more than 100 entries in need of review" This should have been specified by 2 separate tags: "Categories with more than 100 entries" and "In need of review".

[deleted]

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#207

Post by ggm »

mceachen wrote: post #178
ggm wrote: post #114

Approximate date is the bugbear of photo tagging. EXIF and Dublin core and vendors can't agree what to do. Camera manufacturers don't care because at time of shot, date is fixed. It's archival, scanned and copied predigital work.

For what it's worth, ExifTool (and by extension, PhotoStructure) support 0 for month and day. The problem is that most all other applications won't see this as a valid date. And I've struggled with how to covert this "fuzzy" date into something that sorts with other assets that _do_ have an exact date. Should they all live on the first of the month? In the middle of the fuzzy date range? Midnight? Noon?

Yes, I like your software and paid for it. But as you note it's not a solution guaranteed to be portable to another photo framework or even Microsoft file tag management.

DC discussed approximate dates at some point. What does 'circa' 1900 mean to searches by date? Is 1892 circa 1900.

It's hard.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#208

Post by holub008 »

milesskorpen wrote: post #50
joshu wrote: post #42

there's a massive difference between tagging-for-self-recall and tagging-for-other-recall. when i invented tagging the first was paramount, but the latter has become dominant and has very different design considerations one interesting note: you can infer a bunch of hierarchical information since people frequently tag from broader to more specific, topicwise. some things can be tagged by multiple people and you can t…

"When I invited tagging" is such a flex. But creating delicious gives you some credible claims there.

Content tagging in online systems has existed since at least the 1970s, with the earliest example I can think of being MEDLINE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEDLINE

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#209

Post by at_a_remove »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #189
at_a_remove wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it backward: I found the fic through other means entirely and eventually dropped it. When I encountered it again on AO3 (it was a cross-post), I said "Oh, look at those horrible tags." It was notable in the fact that I said "I need to keep this one handy the next time I end up having yet another conversation with someone about how much tagging sucks on AO3." Because this isn't the first time someone has brou…

Wait so, this tag you didn't like didn't even stop you from finding the fic? It didn't clog up your search at all because it wasn't even in your search when you found the fic you were looking for? What's the problem exactly? You're approaching this with a library lens but it's not a library! It was never even intended to be a library! Additionally, it doesn't show up when you're searching for regeneration or limbs be…

And that's a problem, isn't it? I shouldn't have to be immersed in a culture to use the system. You've traded usability and user experience for ... a cultural in-joke. "Hi, this is AO3, and our tags aren't anything like anyone else's tags, but we're still gonna call them tags" is a problem. It's like if I made a search bar and it returned random results. It says search, but culturally, we give you random results. That's how we do it.

That's why we developed librarianship.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#210

Post by langsoul-com »

dahdum wrote: post #71

I adore tagging systems and have worked on them in several different applications and implementations, but there are always pitfalls and trade offs, and it’s possible to bury yourself Nowadays I nearly always store the assigned tags as an integer array column in Postgres, then use the intarray extension to handle the arbitrary boolean expression searches like “((1|2)&(3)&(！5))”. I still have a tags table that stores…

I just made tags nosql, it's stored as json data in pg with a user set to each tag.

I think the relation was that each user could have mutlitple posts that each contain multiple tags.

Where each tag is global with an user ids stored with the user Id as the key. Or something approximatating that.

Mainly to not need insane queries for many to many relationships. O(1) baby.

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