On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 8:28 PM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, WHEN we get the infrastructure. When we see what it looks like and how responsive it is. When we see how usable it is.
...
Perpetual catch-22.
Finding things using category intersections is totally useless when things have been reduced to a single category, ... and not very useful when the categories applied are "Bridges made of stone in the Ukraine with a rated capacity greater than 200 poot"
The idea of 'a category implies its children' isn't possible in high performance solutions because it would make it possible for a single user action to have to touch millions of elements of data. (Cat:C contains all plaints, C is put into A, now the internal references for A have to have all plants added)... while a pure tagging system is either O(1) or O(number of cats on an image) operation per update depending on if the data is forward or inverse indexed.
There is no huge technical challenge in making ultrafast intersections. Any full-text indexing system can do it. I put up an example external system built on postgresql some months ago that could intersect/exclude *any* mixture of categories in a few milliseconds I turned it off because no one was using it and one day MSN's web spider decided to enumerate all possible intersections. ;)
I don't see why anyone is going to have much interest in building fast intersection systems which will have limited usefulness given how many users believe we should be using categories. ... so if people will only *consider* possibly changing their behavior after the system is fully formed and production ready, we seem to have a stalemate.
(Ha, Enwp can keep their inclusionists and deletionists ... At commons we have intersectionalists and classificationists!)
.