On 1/30/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
It works poorly if you expand all the way, and the higher up in the tree you start, the worse it works. In my experience using Duesentrieb's tool, it works quite well when you specify a low depth (depth=1,2,3). Often 1 is appropriate.
*sigh*.
In my example, cutting at depth 3 would prevent you from finding many of the copyright tags for example, [[:category:Copyright_statuses]]->[[:category:Public_domain]]->[[:category:PD_US_Government]]->[[:category:PD_US_Military]]->[[:category:PD_US_Navy]]->[[:category:PD_US_Navy_Historical_Center]]
The policy of only placing the most specific categories combined with a constant pressure to shrink categories ensures that objects are placed at maximal depth.
If I fix bug1211 on commons will you withdraw your objection to large categories? Changing the code to make two queries probably wouldn't be too stab worthy.
In any case, even marked up relationships don't solve the drift problem.. because you can still get it with pure subset operations. Not to mention that multiple edge types makes writing queries even more mind bending.
Frankly, I think it's really offensive that we'll waste are time talking about army waving dreams of semantic mediawiki with its academic appeal, when we can't even manage to provide the basic service our users require.
Go over to Getty images (http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/home/home.aspx) and try out their search and see just how much we suck. Do a 'search all creative' and type in 'black child eating icecream'.
Their system is quite simple but very powerful. They have many tags, from very broad to very specific, and images are marked with all that apply (sometimes many dozens). A simple tag suggestion system makes it easy to find the tags that are in use, and clear up ambiguities (do you want black the color or black the race?). You then query them with a simple and quick intersection tool. You can drill down or adjust your search string, but it's all very simple quick and easy. There are no complex query languages, no snazzy semantic markup, no funky idea hierarchies. It just WORKS. And it works for many tens of thousands of people every day.
With the man power we can put behind marking up our content there is no reason we couldn't be just as good in this regard as the commercial stock photo houses. But we're not. Commons stinks in comparison and if we continue to put off simple and straight-forward measures which will provide the basic features that people need in favor of using commons as a science project and forever waiting for some ill-defined great academic pie in the sky that may never come true... we will just continue to suck.
Oh well, at least we're Free. :)