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An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a na

An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jeddy3 5y ago
I'm having troubles visualising what you mean, without it becoming "just folders". Can you elaborate?
- willbudd 5y ago
  As a node in a tree hierarchy any folder can only have one parent folder. Tags of course allow nodes to have any number of parents (aka "associations"). The relationship between arbitrary nodes in a tree can be determined by tracing their common ancestry, but tags don't provide equivalent functionality, unless you strictly define how tags themselves relate to other tags. An obvious way to do so is to prescribe that every tag shall have exactly one parent (except for the root abstract "thing" tag). In other words tags become folders, but any non-folder content of those folders can simultaneously live inside any number of folders. Similar to symlinks, but arguably less hacky, because there is no differentiation between "actual" location and "linked" location.
  - jholman 5y ago
    > Similar to symlinks, but arguably less hacky, because there is no differentiation between "actual" location and "linked" location. In other words, similar to hardlinks
    - willbudd 5y ago
      Right, yes. True. I should have compared with hardlinks instead. Minor detail: I intended for different deletion semantics from hardlinks. Whereas hardlinks use reference counting for that (only the last deletion actually deletes); for my purposes, delete anywhere meant delete everywhere.
- fikama 5y ago
  I am not the author of the previous comment so my view could be different. But I have thought about it. With tags, you could have got one note in multiple directories. Imagine I have found an interesting blog post on HN about SQLite in python. It could be problematic to decide is it more about python of Sqlite? Tags could look like this: python, databases, SQL, SQLite, $date, FromHN, beautiful_site (I liked the look of this blog) or in proposed system /IT/Databases/SQL/Sqlite /IT/Python/libraries/SQLite /IntrestingHNposts/2022/July /beutiful_site the difference between "just folders" and the proposed system is that you could have one note in multiple folders. Which gives you more flexibility in assigning notes to its topics. But it is still more structural than tags which could easily turn into an unpenetrable list of random words. To be fair you could also achieve it with symlinks.
alpaca128 5y ago
Maybe something like "hierarchical taxonomy", or just simply class hierarchy? Though I'm not aware of such a term that's explicitly for tags if that's the point.
slaymaker1907 5y ago
I'm not sure of a name, but Tiddlywiki does this. You create hierarchies by having tags by creating an item with the tag as its name which causes all items with said tag to be a child of that item. This has a nice side effect of allowing items to exist in multiple locations (so no unique parent is enforced) while still requiring the graph to be acyclic. It ends up working kind of like hard links for folders/files, but it is a lot easier to setup since child items are the ones which declare where they are located, not the parents/directories. I think another reason why hard links are more difficult to use than this particular system is that with Tiddlywiki, it is easy to see all the locations an item falls under at once as well as seeing all the items at a particular location. I feel like adding this reverse location information would be quite helpful and would be less of a change than implementing tags for existing filesystems.
- h0p3 5y ago
  Sir Bimlas' TW5-Locator tool is worth checking out: https://github.com/bimlas/tw5-locator https://github.com/bimlas/tw5-locator.
fellowniusmonk 5y ago
Forever ago I built something similar for generating canonical urls for SEO from a tag system (and to concentrate "google juice" from linking), though hierarchies were not strictly enforced. "expert/american" and "american/expert" couldn't have duplicate content so you take your tag system and overlay hierarchies. Anything that wasn't manually set was auto hierarchied based on highest traffic volume. I also prevented tags from showing up on the same tag chain, so any given keyword could only appear once. That prevented infinite recursion. Moving away from hierarchy also made interesting permutations easier to generate. Since any metadata can become a tag, price or price range ($100hr – $300hr) is easy to generate and "enhance" American/Experts/Between$100and$300anhour. It worked really well, allowed us to manually enforce high traffic hierarchies/phrases while still auto-generating intelligent canonical links for the rest of the site.
- ewuhic 5y ago
  Didn't google punish your site for having duplicate entries under different urls?
  - fellowniusmonk 5y ago
    I might not have been clear enough I think. I can clarify further if the below is insufficient. That was the point of labeling 1 version of any duplicated permutation "canonical", to prevent duplicate content penalties. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...

An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jeddy3 5y ago

I'm having troubles visualising what you mean, without it becoming "just folders". Can you elaborate?

willbudd 5y ago
As a node in a tree hierarchy any folder can only have one parent folder. Tags of course allow nodes to have any number of parents (aka "associations"). The relationship between arbitrary nodes in a tree can be determined by tracing their common ancestry, but tags don't provide equivalent functionality, unless you strictly define how tags themselves relate to other tags. An obvious way to do so is to prescribe that every tag shall have exactly one parent (except for the root abstract "thing" tag). In other words tags become folders, but any non-folder content of those folders can simultaneously live inside any number of folders. Similar to symlinks, but arguably less hacky, because there is no differentiation between "actual" location and "linked" location.
- jholman 5y ago
  > Similar to symlinks, but arguably less hacky, because there is no differentiation between "actual" location and "linked" location. In other words, similar to hardlinks
  - willbudd 5y ago
    Right, yes. True. I should have compared with hardlinks instead. Minor detail: I intended for different deletion semantics from hardlinks. Whereas hardlinks use reference counting for that (only the last deletion actually deletes); for my purposes, delete anywhere meant delete everywhere.
fikama 5y ago
I am not the author of the previous comment so my view could be different. But I have thought about it. With tags, you could have got one note in multiple directories. Imagine I have found an interesting blog post on HN about SQLite in python. It could be problematic to decide is it more about python of Sqlite? Tags could look like this: python, databases, SQL, SQLite, $date, FromHN, beautiful_site (I liked the look of this blog) or in proposed system /IT/Databases/SQL/Sqlite /IT/Python/libraries/SQLite /IntrestingHNposts/2022/July /beutiful_site the difference between "just folders" and the proposed system is that you could have one note in multiple folders. Which gives you more flexibility in assigning notes to its topics. But it is still more structural than tags which could easily turn into an unpenetrable list of random words. To be fair you could also achieve it with symlinks.

alpaca128 5y ago

Maybe something like "hierarchical taxonomy", or just simply class hierarchy? Though I'm not aware of such a term that's explicitly for tags if that's the point.

slaymaker1907 5y ago

I'm not sure of a name, but Tiddlywiki does this. You create hierarchies by having tags by creating an item with the tag as its name which causes all items with said tag to be a child of that item. This has a nice side effect of allowing items to exist in multiple locations (so no unique parent is enforced) while still requiring the graph to be acyclic. It ends up working kind of like hard links for folders/files, but it is a lot easier to setup since child items are the ones which declare where they are located, not the parents/directories. I think another reason why hard links are more difficult to use than this particular system is that with Tiddlywiki, it is easy to see all the locations an item falls under at once as well as seeing all the items at a particular location. I feel like adding this reverse location information would be quite helpful and would be less of a change than implementing tags for existing filesystems.

h0p3 5y ago
Sir Bimlas' TW5-Locator tool is worth checking out: https://github.com/bimlas/tw5-locator https://github.com/bimlas/tw5-locator.

fellowniusmonk 5y ago

Forever ago I built something similar for generating canonical urls for SEO from a tag system (and to concentrate "google juice" from linking), though hierarchies were not strictly enforced. "expert/american" and "american/expert" couldn't have duplicate content so you take your tag system and overlay hierarchies. Anything that wasn't manually set was auto hierarchied based on highest traffic volume. I also prevented tags from showing up on the same tag chain, so any given keyword could only appear once. That prevented infinite recursion. Moving away from hierarchy also made interesting permutations easier to generate. Since any metadata can become a tag, price or price range ($100hr – $300hr) is easy to generate and "enhance" American/Experts/Between$100and$300anhour. It worked really well, allowed us to manually enforce high traffic hierarchies/phrases while still auto-generating intelligent canonical links for the rest of the site.

ewuhic 5y ago
Didn't google punish your site for having duplicate entries under different urls?
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  I might not have been clear enough I think. I can clarify further if the below is insufficient. That was the point of labeling 1 version of any duplicated permutation "canonical", to prevent duplicate content penalties. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...