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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

#41

Post by goto11 »

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 :-)

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#42

Post by joshu »

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 thus infer synonyms as well. this can thus be fixed in search.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#43

Post by NWoodsman »

In my app, users apply a set of tags to a note, but then the app automatically creates hierarchical associations in a tree. There are an exponential number of associations between tags (At one point design was failing because it was trying to prebuild 100k+ GUI items for these cross-referenced tags) so I had to virtualize the intersection of tags at the exact moment a user expands a tree item.

You cannot plan what tag search will lead you back to the data you want, so every node in the graph must be bidirectional.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#44

Post by philip1209 »

We spent a lot of time building tagging systems to organize technology skills on https://www.moonlightwork.com.

The coolest part was training a collaborative filter on the tags. So, when you add "Django" as a skill, it could recommend "Python" as a related skill. This made for some refined user experiences.

Getting typeahead search right took a lot of refinement. Here is some of the logic we ended up implementing over time:

1. Exact matches get prioritized first (e.g. "Go")

2. Abbreviations support (e.g., "AWS" for "Amazon web services" or "ROR" for "Ruby on Rails")

3. Name that start with query should go before non-leading matches (e.g., "Ru" should return "ruby" before "task runner")

4. We tracked an "Aliases" column for each tag to enhance search. So, "golang" was an alias for "go".

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#45

Post by at_a_remove »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #29
at_a_remove wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AO3 tagging system badly needs pruning. I hesitate to make examples, as the specificity will serve as a "call out," but quite a lot of authors throw in single-use, digressive tags as some kind of commentary on their own work. Huge meandering swaths of crap tags, and the people who make them ought to have their permissions to create tags revoked.

I kind of disagree with this. Tags are dual use in AO3, specifically they serve as a way to find specific stories with specific thematic or plot elements, but they additionally serve as a free expression of the author because its the author who chooses which if any tags they want to use to describe their piece. When an author gets to decide the categories of a work, the categorization also becomes an expression. Cons…

I will paraphrase this to avoid a callout, but "no regenerating limbs those arms are toast sorry QA despises them" is not a useful tag. (This is a mild example, I've seen far worse)

First, it is a single-use tag. Tags are for categories, not solo entries. Solo entries explode the tagspace to no good end.

Second, that expression belongs in the summation of the work, or just about anywhere else. Tags are for other people to use to find similar works or for readers to look for things based on their interests. Metadata is not for artistic expression, unless you're one of those people who believes that artists ought to be able to choose their own Library of Congress call numbers and such, people who want to include "elephant" in the metadata despite the work having nothing to do with elephants.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#46

Post by FpUser »

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…

>"I think tag aliases are fine, but in my opinion, tags should not have hierarchies."

Many years ago I've developed a proprietary database for a media related product. It was a NoSQL Entity-Attribute-Value database where Attribute was basically a tag. Tags had no hierarchy but query language allowed to specify sequence of attributes like Genre, Artist, Album, Title. When said sequence was not empty the result set would be a tree where each level would correspond to an attribute position as defined in query.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#47

Post by greggman3 »

counttheforks wrote: post #13

Anyone have a suggestion for a tagging filesystem that is maintained? Or if not a filesystem, something that at least works? I still feel like this is the best way to organize personal photos and media, and while https://www.tagsistant.net/ is pretty good it hasn't been updated in 6 years and is fairly buggy.

MacOS has tags. Right click any file in finder, select "Tags..."

No idea if they are implemented at a filesystem level but there are various tools for finding things by tag

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#48

Post by NWoodsman »

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…

I understand your pain, but want to make you aware that LINQ has become so powerful especially with lazy evaluation and expression trees that hierarchical views of tags is really basically simple and actually just one more method of visualizing data...

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#49

Post by jrochkind1 »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #18
jrochkind1 wrote: post #14

> I can't find anything on how to design and implement anymore more than the barebones basics of a system. All of this stuff (horse/horses etc) is extensively discussed, maybe look under "taxonomy" or "ontology". Now, whether you want to use any of those solutions or not or find the discussion useful or not... if you aren't finding anything about it at all, you aren't looking in the right places. (I learned about it…

Can you link some resources about it then?

I could, but honestly I'd just be googling "taxonomy". But ok that's not entirely true, I know how to refine my search and recognize when something is what I'm thinking of, from some familiarity with the field.

(But if you want to look around, in addition to "taxonomy" and "ontology", other good terms are "information architecture" and "controlled vocabulary").

These are not things I have vetted, this is literally just me googling and taking a quick skim...

https://blog.optimalworkshop.com/how-to-develop-a-taxonomy-f...

https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/introduction-to-taxonomies/

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/taxonomy-101/

http://accidental-taxonomist.blogspot.com/2020/11/what-it-th...

Or how about some textbooks:

https://narrowgaugebooks.indielite.org/book/9781627055802

https://www.hedden-information.com/accidental-taxonomist/

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#50

Post by milesskorpen »

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.
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