Slashdot Mirror
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."
that is all
Tagging isn't anything. It's a construct within a semantic web design; a common-language-everywhere issue. Essentially, you want everyone to agree to a tagging vocabulary, or morph things into it using automation. Why not just ask everyone to speak Esperanto?
My questions for OP...
why use words of any language?
why isn't everything online (include video, images, sound) simply act like a tag with "search the web with this input"?
isn't the best database of tags the web itself? in that case, isn't our best query a search engine?
* Put CCTV cameras up near common targets
* Restrict sales of spraypaint to adults
* Beat patrols
See? Tagging isn't so hard to solve.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Are we talking about labeling, tagging in the version control sense, egocentric graffiti? Can't figure it out from the summary.
My tag "firetheeditors", to catalogue the poor editing jobs and dupes of Slashdot, has yet to catch on...
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
I do not think "luminaries" means what you think it means.
Also, WTF is Graal?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
... or some other language where every word has one and only one meaning.
"Somehow I remain convinced that a unified, semantically-based solution, using a mix of folksonomy and taxonomy, is the Graal of tagging."
So basically you want everyone to agree on what to call everything. HA! Will never happen. Words mean different things in different contexts. A word that's overly-general in one context will be overly-specific in another. Also, fun fact: not everyone on the planet speaks the same language. Hell, even time changes words. 10 seconds ago, I learned that "Graal" was a word: "Holy Grail, or "Graal" in older forms" If you want a good tagging solution, start by not trying to be so cute and showing off how smart you are and use words that are used today -- call it "the grail" like everyone else in this century. People like you are what breaks tagging systems. :-)
We'll probably solve the problem of how to identify people before we come up with a unified way to name things.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Tags are random stuff about what people are thinking of at any given time.
So if I tag something as #anyhoo #whatever and #squork -- that's what I felt like tagging it as, and in the process I might want to make tags which aren't there or make up new ones.
If tags are meant to be a measure of the zeitgeist and what people are thinking, they're not going to do is according to some taxonomy.
Besides, some bastard will just want to come along and monetize tags and be the canonical source -- #screwem #taxonomyneednotapply
Having a "unified, semantically-based solution, using a mix of folksonomy and taxonomy" is someone trying to impose structure on something which is inherently not structured, and people will never conform to it.
I can see why in corporate contexts you'd want a taxonomy, but for the rest of the world this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. The world isn't something for librarians and archivists to tell us how we should categorize things.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Every article on slashdot gets the default tag "story".
Fucking useless.
One thing file system directory trees have shown me is that hierarchy is lousy for categorizing. Convenient for file systems, bad for people. The example I like to use is 2 applications organized into binary and data files. Should the files be put in these directories: /app1/bin, /app1/data, /app2/bin, /app2/data ? Or in these directories: /bin/app1, /bin/app2, /data/app1, /data/app2 ? Or should we use some kind of directory linking, so we can sort of have it both ways? This leads to a question about OOP. If hierarchical organizations are bad for files, maybe they're also bad for classes?
Whatever else tags do, they dispense with hierarchy. A file system that truly did away with the hierarchical directory structure and used tags would be interesting. The problem in the above example would vanish, with the files in question merely being tagged as app1 or app2, and as bin or data. Ask for a directory listing of all files tagged as bin, and get all the files tagged as app1 and bin, and app2 and bin. Strips the ordering out of the problem, leaving categorization, which is still a tough problem.
I ran into this tagging problem when thinking about an app to sort images. The idea was to compare 2 images, and come up with a percentage value of how similar they were to each other, with 100% being identical, and 0% being totally different. But, on what criteria should images be compared? I saw that it was much too simplistic to boil down a comparison of such intricate data to just one number.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
A classic book on the ontology of categories by George Lakoff. The tagging problem, in a nutshell, is that different cultures (and different individuals) create different category systems. The Tower of Babel on the semantic level.
Make slashdot.org/tag the index page for the list of tags. http://slashdot.org/tag/$tag isn't cutting it. Put more than five seconds of effort into its format. Put a link to it in the left column menu, or next to the toe tag icon. Sorted. Optionals: On the tag search page put a top 10 list of "related" tags - tags which most commonly occur in conjunction with this tag in a story. This provides a "conceptual web of themes" or meme map. Allow searching for tag1+tag2-tag3... and so on. Normalize the tag database: in the index list of tags will be some misspellings, synonyms and such - hunt those down with search and replace to get rid of redundant and obvious error tags to get the length of the tag list down to something comprehensible. I would suggest some more, but that's a lot of work already.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Please tell me. To eliminate diversity of thought? To make it easier for advertisers and others to colonize our lives? What's the GOAL here?