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