4 ms·

Tagging is the first step, but how do you know if you don't have overlapping or duplicate tags, say country and folk music? If you need something that fits both

Tagging is the first step, but how do you know if you don't have overlapping or duplicate tags, say country and folk music? If you need something that fits both categories, you eventually start designing taxonomies and eventually ontologies, there's just no end to it. I think tagging is a sensible, lightweight approach, but it has limitations...

fao_ 9y ago
> country and folk music Folk music has nothing to do with country. Country was invented in the 1800s by a businessman who aimed it at primarily white Americans. Folk music has a rich history dating before the 1200s and before much of written language. Many songs of Irish and Welsh descent date before record, still being played today. Nevertheless, to answer your question: 1) metatags, parent tags, and the like provide ways to structure tag relationships to encompass and describe what you speak of. 2) There are many networks out there that share user's tags based on file hashes. A system could scrape these networks for existing tags and autotag many items without the user's interaction (beyond initiating the autotagger). Users could also get their hands dirty and ask for only tags relating to parent categories, or something like that.
- marshray 9y ago
  We can also blame Nashville for taking the 'Western' out of 'Country & Western'.
- Izkata 9y ago
  > > country and folk music > Folk music has nothing to do with country. I think the point was that they're both "music"; congrats, now you have a hierarchy again!
- kazinator 9y ago
  "Folk music" possibly rides on the definition of "folk", which brings in a lot of diversity if interpreted broadly. The word "folk" also denotes recognizeable format in the context of commercial broadcasting and streaming of canned music. It basically refers to a locus roughly centered around someone crooning while strumming chords on an acoustic guitar.
  - fao_ 9y ago
    > The word "folk" also denotes recognizeable format in the context of commercial broadcasting and streaming of canned music. That's a very american-centric view you have there.
    - kazinator 9y ago
      That isn't what you might call my "view"; I'm just remarking on how it seems that a word happens to be used in a certain culture and context.
39297 9y ago
It is similar to CSS. Either using clumsy naming convention like BEM, or use preprocessor which provide a way to define hierarchy of class. Both would work.
nyir 9y ago
That's what I was thinking, having used RDF a bit. I liked that the article touched on some more intricate details, things like the timestamp when a fact was added, or disputed facts (well, tags ...). But obviously it gets complicated quite quickly.
xkcd-sucks 9y ago
> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. and any tagging scheme sufficiently good enough to describe the real world will implicitly create a hierarchical ontology
- alanbernstein 9y ago
  But it will create multiple hierarchies, as opposed to the single hierarchy to which you are constrained by a conventional filesystem.
  - jmiserez 9y ago
    Do you see that as a positive or a negative?
    - uryga 9y ago
      Not GP, but I'd definitely call that a positive! That's one of my issues with single-inheritance OOP too... There are many hierarchies you might want depending on the aspects you're interested in. "A glass of juice is certainly a drink, but it is also a source of nutrition -- but not every drink is. There's not much nutrition in a glass of water. Likewise, there are many sources of nutrition which are not drinks. [...] A cup of tea is technically a source of energy (it is hot, it contains thermal energy), but so is a battery. Do they have a common base class?"[1] (I remember a better example using soft drinks, but I couldn't find it with a quick google) [1](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1079003/5534735 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1079003/5534735)
    - alanbernstein 9y ago
      Generally a positive, there are drawbacks related to maintenance, but that's a problem for any system. Say you're tagging hundreds of academic papers, so you have top-level tags math, physics, computer-science, graphics, machine-learning. Each of these has many subfields, and there is significant overlap between many of those. Perhaps more importantly, there is unpredictable future overlap, so it is generally impossible to define mutually exclusive categories (i.e. conventional directories [not counting links]) that are future-proof. I like to be able to define each hierarchy separately, then freely apply tags from any hierarchy to any item. That's just one group of related hierarchies, and other categories of items (mutually exclusive categories DO exist, with care they can be suitable for very high-level organization) will have similar groups, which may or may not overlap with the top-level tags listed above. I would love to see a GUI file browser designed with tags as a first-class concept. You might just call them "dynamic folders" - in any folder you can view a list of dynamic folders, generated by the tags in the current folder. This dynamic folder list could be adjusted from 1) only the top levels of the local tag hierarchy, down to N) all unique tags that are present in the current folder.
jmiserez 9y ago
I found this to be a real blocker every time I tried to tag something. However, it’s a complete non-issue if the tags are automatically generated and updated. I first noticed this in the iOS Photos app, which automatically generates collections such as “Weekend in Paris” and “Pictures of Bob”. The accuracy is good enough to be useful and can be improved automatically in future releases without requiring user interaction.

fao_ 9y ago

> country and folk music Folk music has nothing to do with country. Country was invented in the 1800s by a businessman who aimed it at primarily white Americans. Folk music has a rich history dating before the 1200s and before much of written language. Many songs of Irish and Welsh descent date before record, still being played today. Nevertheless, to answer your question: 1) metatags, parent tags, and the like provide ways to structure tag relationships to encompass and describe what you speak of. 2) There are many networks out there that share user's tags based on file hashes. A system could scrape these networks for existing tags and autotag many items without the user's interaction (beyond initiating the autotagger). Users could also get their hands dirty and ask for only tags relating to parent categories, or something like that.

marshray 9y ago
We can also blame Nashville for taking the 'Western' out of 'Country & Western'.
Izkata 9y ago
> > country and folk music > Folk music has nothing to do with country. I think the point was that they're both "music"; congrats, now you have a hierarchy again!
kazinator 9y ago
"Folk music" possibly rides on the definition of "folk", which brings in a lot of diversity if interpreted broadly. The word "folk" also denotes recognizeable format in the context of commercial broadcasting and streaming of canned music. It basically refers to a locus roughly centered around someone crooning while strumming chords on an acoustic guitar.
- fao_ 9y ago
  > The word "folk" also denotes recognizeable format in the context of commercial broadcasting and streaming of canned music. That's a very american-centric view you have there.
  - kazinator 9y ago
    That isn't what you might call my "view"; I'm just remarking on how it seems that a word happens to be used in a certain culture and context.

39297 9y ago

It is similar to CSS. Either using clumsy naming convention like BEM, or use preprocessor which provide a way to define hierarchy of class. Both would work.

nyir 9y ago

That's what I was thinking, having used RDF a bit. I liked that the article touched on some more intricate details, things like the timestamp when a fact was added, or disputed facts (well, tags ...). But obviously it gets complicated quite quickly.

xkcd-sucks 9y ago

> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. and any tagging scheme sufficiently good enough to describe the real world will implicitly create a hierarchical ontology

alanbernstein 9y ago
But it will create multiple hierarchies, as opposed to the single hierarchy to which you are constrained by a conventional filesystem.
- jmiserez 9y ago
  Do you see that as a positive or a negative?
  - uryga 9y ago
    Not GP, but I'd definitely call that a positive! That's one of my issues with single-inheritance OOP too... There are many hierarchies you might want depending on the aspects you're interested in. "A glass of juice is certainly a drink, but it is also a source of nutrition -- but not every drink is. There's not much nutrition in a glass of water. Likewise, there are many sources of nutrition which are not drinks. [...] A cup of tea is technically a source of energy (it is hot, it contains thermal energy), but so is a battery. Do they have a common base class?"[1] (I remember a better example using soft drinks, but I couldn't find it with a quick google) [1](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1079003/5534735 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1079003/5534735)
  - alanbernstein 9y ago
    Generally a positive, there are drawbacks related to maintenance, but that's a problem for any system. Say you're tagging hundreds of academic papers, so you have top-level tags math, physics, computer-science, graphics, machine-learning. Each of these has many subfields, and there is significant overlap between many of those. Perhaps more importantly, there is unpredictable future overlap, so it is generally impossible to define mutually exclusive categories (i.e. conventional directories [not counting links]) that are future-proof. I like to be able to define each hierarchy separately, then freely apply tags from any hierarchy to any item. That's just one group of related hierarchies, and other categories of items (mutually exclusive categories DO exist, with care they can be suitable for very high-level organization) will have similar groups, which may or may not overlap with the top-level tags listed above. I would love to see a GUI file browser designed with tags as a first-class concept. You might just call them "dynamic folders" - in any folder you can view a list of dynamic folders, generated by the tags in the current folder. This dynamic folder list could be adjusted from 1) only the top levels of the local tag hierarchy, down to N) all unique tags that are present in the current folder.

jmiserez 9y ago

I found this to be a real blocker every time I tried to tag something. However, it’s a complete non-issue if the tags are automatically generated and updated. I first noticed this in the iOS Photos app, which automatically generates collections such as “Weekend in Paris” and “Pictures of Bob”. The accuracy is good enough to be useful and can be improved automatically in future releases without requiring user interaction.