Ask Slashdot: Tags and Tagging, What Is the Best Way Forward?

siliconbits writes "The debate about tagging has been going for nearly a decade. Slashdot has covered it a number of times. But it seems that nobody has yet to come up with a foolproof solution to tagging. Even luminaries like Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo and Slashdot all have different tagging schemes. Commontag, a venture launched in 2009 to tackle tagging, has proved to be all but a failure despite the backing of heavyweights like Freebase, Yahoo and Zemanta. Even Google gave up and purchased Freebase in July 2010. Somehow I remain convinced that a unified, semantically-based solution, using a mix of folksonomy and taxonomy, is the Graal of tagging. I'd like to hear from fellow Slashdotters as to how they tackle the issue of creating and maintaining a tagging solution, regardless of the platform and the technologies being used in the backend." A good time to note: there may be no pretty way to get at them, but finding stories with a particular tag on Slashdot is simple, at least one at a time: Just fill in a tag you'd like to explore after "slashdot.org/tag/", as in "slashdot.org/tag/bizarro."

Comments

Re:fuck tags

[mcmonkey]

The question really misses the point, though. If you index the entire contents, then anyone searching will find it based on what they know, not what you think of in advance. Google seems to do pretty well at locating pages, despite many fine pages lacking meta tags (and despite many poor spam articles trying to abuse meta tags.) If the keywords aren't present in the article, it's probably not a very useful article anyway, as it obviously is lacking a common description.

Nail, head. Having people provide tags or keywords is asking people to adapt to the way computers work. While not perfect, Google shows us we can have computers adapt to the way people work.

polyheirarchy & faceting.

[oneiros27]

You're assuming that each item only has one natural parent -- which may be true in most taxonomies, but more complex systems (thesaurii*, ontologies), allow for more complex parent-type relationships.

What you're dealing with is even simpler -- facets. You have a bunch of items with two attributes (application, type of file), and each attribute has a limited set of mutually exclusive options. Some file systems can store extended attributes, but they're not always that efficient (as it's not something in high demand). BFS was the only file system that I know of that really pushed it as a main feature.

* Roget's Thesaurus is a synonym ring, not a thesaurus.