On 12/08/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 13/08/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
b) is perhaps more interesting. In the bowels of
whatever system you
use for tagging, set it up so that one tag, one identifier, can be
represented by many different tags. In effect, allow "cat" and
"cats",
but ensure a search for one displays the other as well. LibraryThing
does this, and does it fairly well; their tag lists contain
mispellings and foreign terms as well as variant names, which is quite
useful. Configuring this and ensuring it doesn't get accidentally
snarled up - inadvertently merging two large groups can be confusing -
is tricky, but once it's up and running it should require less ongoing
maintenance.
ok... this is interesting. I didn't know this. Don't suppose their SW
happens to be open source? :)
I have no idea; I suspect not, since it's mostly homebrewed and they
are selling it as a subscription service... but then, it might not be
desperately much use to us anyway, given it's homebrewed and targeted
specifically for running their site.
http://www.librarything.com/blog/2005/12/combining-tags-heresy.php is
the original blog post discussing it; he notes Clay Shirky's
objections to it.
[on 'film', 'cinema', 'movies'] "Those terms actually encode
different
things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves
signal assumes that that there's no signal in the difference itself,
and no value in protecting the user from too many matches."
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html#mind_reading
This is a real issue, but I think - *think* - it's not one we need to
be desperately paranoid about. The valuable semantic ambiguities lie
in intangibles, conceptual things, which are generally not what we
want to be tagging a photograph with! We're basically looking at
things not ideas, and there's a much more solid mapping of terminology
there.
(I really don't get the workings of the MediaWiki category system very
well. Can we have 'redirect categories'? That might help)
http://www.librarything.com/tagcombine_log.php gives you an idea of
the kind of tag merging going on.
The other problem which cannot be ignored in relation
to
tagging/categories is that people need to be able to use the
equivalent tag in their own language, and have the tags show up in
their own language, while still seeing all the files that have been
tagged with the equivalent tag in other languages.
Yeah. Though... hmm. The LT model is that each tag is basically a
redirect (to use our jargon) for the "main tag", which is determined
by raw popularity; it presumably wouldn't be too difficult to have the
main tag vary by language if you had some way of categorising the
"minor tags" by source language.
The real killer here would *probably* be the multilingual homonym
problem - orthographically identical words that mean different things
in different languages; they'd get combined happily because as far as
a monolingual speaker knew, they were unambiguous, and have...
interesting... knock-on effects.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk