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."
* 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."
The problem that some have here with the term "cloud" I have with "tag". I'm not sure how it differs from a "keyword".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Every article on slashdot gets the default tag "story".
Fucking useless.
It's nothing more than associating an identifier or keyword with something. The asker is bemoaning the lack of standards in those identifiers, how to apply them, how to search on them.
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.
John
Nonsense.
There are only small localized subsections of "technicla fields" where tagging is of any importance at all, and metadata is
simply the latest over-hyped buzzword of this small segment.
The vast majority of "technical fields" have no need of this. Its not even widely used in computerized systems.
It mostly sprung up from people who's only knowledge of computer systems came from the area of database administration.
We've been through these hype-wars before. In five to seven years you won't even remember why this was so important to you.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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.