Hi guys,
So we're having the tags discussion again? Pops up every once in a
while. Tags is a step backwards compared to categories. With tags there
is a relation between an object (a photo) and a word. No way of telling
what the relation is, what language the tag is, no relations between
tags etc etc. So just a word and no more metadata, but it is very easy
for the user. On the other side we have semantic web (yes, I said the S
word!). That's like an utopia we'll never reach. Categories are
somewhere in between. There's a relation between an object and a
category, we don't know what that relation is. There are relations
between categories, also we don't know what these relations are.
Would be nice if we could use all the information of the current
category system to build a better new system. Imho the most important
problem of our current system is intersections. Category:Churches gets
too crowded so we intersect it with locations (I even wrote a bot to do
that). This "hides" a lot of images. We want to add atomic things, let's
call them labels. So I want to add the label "church" and the label
"Amsterdam" and have some clever software figure out the intersection.
Between these labels you can define relations again (maybe even specify
more than a relation?) and you can add translations. For the simple user
the label should just work like a tag (click, added Amsterdam & Church),
but the more advanced user could add more information like translations,
relations with other labels, link to Wikipedia articles etc etc making
it a powerful system.
Maarten