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Taxonomies are not only hard, but impossible. Tagging is hardly better. The problem you run into with tagging is that one day you call them `photos` and the nex

Taxonomies are not only hard, but impossible. Tagging is hardly better. The problem you run into with tagging is that one day you call them `photos` and the next day you call them `pictures` or `pics` or `photography` or `disneyland trip 2019` or nothing at all, and then the day after that you can't find anything. The only solution is constant maintenance. Organization of non-trivial amounts of information is an ongoing problem, not solvable per se. You can hack out a path through the jungle, but the jungle just keeps growing.

yencabulator 4y ago
One thing I've done ever since the days of del.icio.us is look for the tags that have the fewest matches -- most often they were typos, synonyms, or singular/plural confusion.
Bilal_io 4y ago
I think the tagging issue can be solved by a system that gives the user suggestions from what they've entered before, and if they need to create a new rag, it has to be an explicit "create new tag" action so they don't end up with similar tags due to typos "pictures" "Pictures" "Picures".. But yeah, I can't argue that tagging solves the problem at hand.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  In practice that doesn't solve the problem as much as you'd expect. Consider two or more people maintaining the same system. You are tagging something, and the tags that first come to your mind don't appear among the suggested ones: is that because you're the first person to ever tag something like this, or is it that you're describing it in a different way than I did last year? Your options for finding out are: 1. Step back and do some research, look at all the tags and find ones that someone might have used to describe something similar, and then check the original item to make sure. 2. Ask your team if anybody has tagged something like this before. 3. Institute a sort of merge request process for new item tags. 4. Make up a new tag and move on. Guess which option people usually go with?
  - yunwal 4y ago
    I wonder whether language models could be used to solve this problem. Convert every tag to a latent space vector and show the user all of the closest existing tags in a dropdown with the option to create a new one at the bottom.
    - karaterobot 4y ago
      That would be a cool tool to have. In the end, it still comes down to humans being conscientious every time they add something to the library. The equivalent would be having really nice software development lifecycle processes: test suites, merge request gating, etc, and once in a while (ha ha) people still manage to push out half-baked changes when they're in a hurry. In the end it's a human issue, tools only do so much. And in domains outside of coding, it's harder to find regressions automatically, so they tend to go uncaught and accumulate.
      - yunwal 4y ago
        Taking this a bit further, do we actually need “tags” that are identical? Rather than filter by a tag, perhaps you could enter a label or set of labels and sort by which results minimize a distance function in latent space. No matching or conscientiousness necessary.

yencabulator 4y ago

One thing I've done ever since the days of del.icio.us is look for the tags that have the fewest matches -- most often they were typos, synonyms, or singular/plural confusion.

Bilal_io 4y ago

I think the tagging issue can be solved by a system that gives the user suggestions from what they've entered before, and if they need to create a new rag, it has to be an explicit "create new tag" action so they don't end up with similar tags due to typos "pictures" "Pictures" "Picures".. But yeah, I can't argue that tagging solves the problem at hand.

karaterobot 4y ago
In practice that doesn't solve the problem as much as you'd expect. Consider two or more people maintaining the same system. You are tagging something, and the tags that first come to your mind don't appear among the suggested ones: is that because you're the first person to ever tag something like this, or is it that you're describing it in a different way than I did last year? Your options for finding out are: 1. Step back and do some research, look at all the tags and find ones that someone might have used to describe something similar, and then check the original item to make sure. 2. Ask your team if anybody has tagged something like this before. 3. Institute a sort of merge request process for new item tags. 4. Make up a new tag and move on. Guess which option people usually go with?
- yunwal 4y ago
  I wonder whether language models could be used to solve this problem. Convert every tag to a latent space vector and show the user all of the closest existing tags in a dropdown with the option to create a new one at the bottom.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    That would be a cool tool to have. In the end, it still comes down to humans being conscientious every time they add something to the library. The equivalent would be having really nice software development lifecycle processes: test suites, merge request gating, etc, and once in a while (ha ha) people still manage to push out half-baked changes when they're in a hurry. In the end it's a human issue, tools only do so much. And in domains outside of coding, it's harder to find regressions automatically, so they tend to go uncaught and accumulate.
    - yunwal 4y ago
      Taking this a bit further, do we actually need “tags” that are identical? Rather than filter by a tag, perhaps you could enter a label or set of labels and sort by which results minimize a distance function in latent space. No matching or conscientiousness necessary.