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I wouldn't bother; the time for this is past. It is not worth curating tags/ontologies. Let the computer do it for you, or don't: just search. Google was right.
by esafak 1y ago
I wouldn't bother; the time for this is past. It is not worth curating tags/ontologies. Let the computer do it for you, or don't: just search. Google was right.
The problem is acute in organizations, where the question of ontology ownership crops up. The last place I worked at had a dedicated engineer on the job. And marvel at the elaborate systems Wikipedia and StackOverflow have to manage their ontologies. It is best to avoid that stuff and improve search instead, which is likely why an ontology was sought in the first place.
- theptip 1y agoIt’s a good observation. Counterpoint - the organization labor is drudge work, maybe with cheap AI labor you can have your KB kept in great shape, and likely this makes it easier for RAG to locate the correct document. Maybe there is room for both, though I am in agreement that it seems dubious a human should be curating.
- Spivak 1y agoI mean that's basically what all these image search indexes do. They look at an image and add a bunch of tags for whatever they see in the photo that can be queried later. It works really well and armed with one of these models and word2vec you can build your own search quite easily. tensorflow object detection is one such means. Hosted solutions would be Amazon Rekognition.
- nabla9 1y ago> Let the computer do it for you, or don't: just search. Only for information that has no real value. Search misses things. Hierarchy or tag ensures that all you have marked can be found.
- esafak 1y agoLike what, domain-specific information? If so, that's a question of fine tuning the (machine learning) model. Thereafter, it can automatically tag as it indexes.
- mook 1y agoLet's say I look up the company benefits and search returns a document from 2015. Is that still relevant, or has it been replaced by a newer policy that search isn't showing? How would I know?
- esafak 1y agoThe computer can figure it out if the new policy is indexed. Alternatively, users can flag bad search results.
- coldtea 1y agoIn real use, hierarchy or tag ensures that you'll miss stuff, and what you didn't mistag or forgot to tag or didn't bother to, will still be difficult to find among the noise of a huge taxonomy or hierarchy...
- setr 1y agoOne major difference is that tags/folders better enable discovery. Search can get you to “similar to thing I found”, but it can’t really do “related to thing I found” ala Wikipedia. AI might be intelligent enough to fix that, but in the end it’d just be automating the curation of tags/ontologies (ideally in manner that’s user-visible and editable)
- coldtea 1y ago>Search can get you to “similar to thing I found”, but it can’t really do “related to thing I found” ala Wikipedia LLM powered search can. >but in the end it’d just be automating the curation of tags/ontologies Automating those is the whole point though.
- mike_ivanov 1y agoThe problem with the "just search" approach is that it creates "dark corners", that is clusters of documents/images ignored by the search engine for whatever reason. I guess it could be addressed with some kind of "what I've been missing" query executed once in a while.
- jeffbee 1y agoWhat about the "dark corners" of tags you forgot to add? That corner seems like it would be far larger.
- spankibalt 1y ago> I wouldn't bother; the time for this is past. It is not worth curating tags/ontologies. Let the computer do it for you, or don't: just search. The only mechanism that will ever be properly able to contextualize the relevance of my ingested information when it counts (as in while I am alive) is me; the only way to do this is by curation. A someone else who understood this once said: "The tool shapes the master; the master shapes the tool". Manually assigning tags are an excellent way of doing this, as long as one doesn't overthink it to such an extent where the curation process meets the harsh realities of diminishing returns. Sadly, many people, constantly jumping from one fad to the next, already fail here.
- karmakaze 1y agoLabels in Gmail is what makes it better (for me) than other email systems.
- hoherd 1y ago> the time for this is past A few nights ago I was looking through photos with my daughter, and she asked to see photos of her. I looked for them using the AI way and found some, but not a whole lot. That's because it missed the vast majority of them, which I then found when looking through files with the same date stamp as some of the AI discovered photos of her. I understand we're on our way to automatically labeled content, but we are a long way off, and the time for manually organizing important information has not yet passed.