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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

#61

Post by PuppyTailWags »

at_a_remove wrote: post #45
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

I think you're missing the point that, in AO3 specifically, tags are not solely metadata. Tags are also artistic expression in the context of AO3. That's the thing. AO3 doesn't function like the Library of Congress, and there are no librarians that are independently assigning categories to fanfic. An author can choose to opt out of tags entirely, and people cannot put tags on other people's fanfic even if it's relevant and would benefit that work's findability. The simple mechanism of the author having sole control of what tags they want to apply to the work causes the act of tagging to also serve the purpose of artistic expression-- this results in spontaneous tags going from single-use to culturally known, such as "no beta we die like men", and therefore I think arguably useful but only in the context of AO3.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#62

Post by photochemsyn »

One area that's illuminating is the effort to annotate the results of whole-genome sequencing projects. Tagging stretches of the genome which represent coherent units of some sort, and then relating them to some functional capability of the organism, is not at all a solved problem.

Here's an overview from 2011 where they're struggling to even get a good tagging system up for single-celled microorganisms (a much easier problem than multicellar genomes like humans):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22180819/

> "Highlights include the development of annotation assessment tools, community acceptance of protein naming standards, comparison of annotation resources to provide consistent annotation, and improved tracking of the evidence used to generate a particular annotation. The development of a set of minimal standards, including the requirement for annotated complete prokaryotic genomes to contain a full set of ribosomal RNAs, transfer RNAs, and proteins encoding core conserved functions, is an historic milestone."

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#63

Post by somat »

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.

unix has tags, they are known as hardlinks.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#64

Post by marbletiles »

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…

Nothing you say is necessarily the case, and is dependent on implementation. Take "value is just always equal to true", well, no, not if your key is a predicate. "Color:red" is more powerful than "#red" or "red:true", and "color:[lookup-ID-for-red-concept]" is substantially more powerful than both.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#65

Post by pessimizer »

> It gets even more complex if tags can have multiple parents, like Wikipedia categories. "American Male Novelists" is a subtag of "American Male Writers" and "American Novelists". Now we have diamond problems, redundancy, a whole host of other edge cases.

I don't understand this problem. I would think that you would have

tag:american

tag:male

tag:novelist

tag:writer,

and tag:novelist would itself be tagged as tag:writer, because all novelists are writers.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#66

Post by bell-cot »

cube2222 wrote: post #53
aaviator42 wrote: post #37

A few months ago I worked on some proof-of-concept code for searching tagged data: https://github.com/aaviator42/Cha I now work full-time in a role where part of my duties is designing a content tagging system and its search functionalities. It's very interesting and fun! Lots of puzzles. How do you weigh different tags? How do you do fuzzy searching ('city' should match with plural ('cities'), misspellings ('citys')…

> How do you program the system so that 'hotdog' is not matched with 'hot' and 'dog'? That sounds like a very good use case for word embeddings.

How do you deal with "hotdog" possibly being a noun (several meanings), or proper noun (several meanings), or verb, or interjection?

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#67

Post by at_a_remove »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #61
at_a_remove wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

I think you're missing the point that, in AO3 specifically, tags are not solely metadata. Tags are also artistic expression in the context of AO3 . That's the thing. AO3 doesn't function like the Library of Congress, and there are no librarians that are independently assigning categories to fanfic. An author can choose to opt out of tags entirely, and people cannot put tags on other people's fanfic even if it's relev…

Then tags in AO3 are just more of the text and not much of a finding aid. You can't have both.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#68

Post by csours »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #55
at_a_remove wrote: post #33

This seems like one of those Eternal Problems that people, whether librarians, programmers, or hobbyists, stumble across, think they'll make headway in, then discover that they've really managed to progress just a few feet across a vast and hostile surface of landmines, pitfalls, and lures. Each "obvious" step (I'll have parent relations to define a context!) is only yet another bargain with the Devil, who laughs at…

I guess if you're really focused on it. I built a content tagging system for an old employer that would attempt to guess context based on keywords and associations but give the writer of the content the final say in what's actually being tagged. Sure, I could have spent a thousand hours refining it, but the improvement would have been marginal and it still would need human interaction.

Was it used for content related to that particular business? I think as long as you have relatively limited variety, you can make something that works well enough.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#69

Post by dymk »

tuatoru wrote: post #56
dymk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's lower effort to make a stream of consciousness post one sentence at a time, and as a bonus, there's a built in audience / discovery network where they're posting.

Lower effort for whom? Back when I were a lad, we were told to write so that our readers did not have to work to understand us. The point of writing is to be understood. Old man yells at cloud.

Lower effort to the writer, obviously.

The point of posting on Twitter is not to be understood, it's to be retweeted.

Re: I am endlessly fascinated with content tagging systems

#70

Post by at_a_remove »

csours wrote: post #68
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if you're really focused on it. I built a content tagging system for an old employer that would attempt to guess context based on keywords and associations but give the writer of the content the final say in what's actually being tagged. Sure, I could have spent a thousand hours refining it, but the improvement would have been marginal and it still would need human interaction.

Was it used for content related to that particular business? I think as long as you have relatively limited variety, you can make something that works well enough.

Similarly, I think if you have a limited number of people doing the classification, you can also make a good shot at it.
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