On 1/30/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)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. :)