December 14, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Simple Metadata
December 15, 2008 at 6:25 am
Tags can be thought of as property values for an instance of an object. Adding a tag is like extending an object definition by adding a new property and setting a value for an instance of that object. The difficulty is in defining the relevant properties of the entire object up-front. The intent and purpose and audience must be understood from the usage start or else there must be the capability to evolve the definition (this may break some of its historical usages though). In some cases, it could be helpful to associate a "measurable degree" to the property which indicates just how much the value assigned to the object is a good fit relative to a defined list of possible values. The category and subcategories should always be in the set of tags for an object in some way, shape or form.
December 15, 2008 at 8:50 am
Great editorial Steve!
This is a topic that we could see more of. Articles that discuss the use of tags, how to implement them in the area of SQL development and something that details the conceptual switch of using cats and sub-cats to using tags. Your team appears to have made that transition very well on the site.
Good job!
December 15, 2008 at 9:18 am
You can always use tags and then build a taxonomy later based on the tags.
A project I developed (an inhouse used equipment sale/trading site - which eventually got canned before release as the business decided to get out of that part of the business), but we used tags and a tag cloud to allow flexibility to the users and administrators of the system and then used the tags that emerged to make some hierarchies amongst some of the tags.
The tags were great for maintenance, browsing and search, and then identifying certain popular emergent tagging behaviors and building hierarchies later allowed us to make very malleable hierarchies (since the hierachy was simply a many-to-many tag relationship, and had nothing to do with the items being tagged.)
December 15, 2008 at 10:22 am
I've blogged about the perils of tagging, especially tagging that's done by the great unwashed. A search engine that relies solely on tags is very weak, IMO. Searching for Mexican Food... on CodePlex? It can be a good source of entertainment, though. 😛 It's a corollary to the skepticism required when reading Wikipedia: don't trust and verify more carefully.
Show us your tag cloud, Steve!
December 15, 2008 at 11:03 am
I'd like to get a cloud up there and thanks for the comments.
I think it would look funny as I haven't done a great job of tagging things outside of a category/sub category until the last couple months.
I'll work on making it better and we'll see if it helps.
December 16, 2008 at 3:47 am
One use of tags I've encountered which has an interesting side-effect is Google mail.
Google allows messages to have "labels" (aka "tags") rather than setting up a folder-based system. Any message can have any number of labels, so it is simply a tag system, but, of course, existing mail clients see the tags as "folders", which means the tags have to include any hierarchy explicitly (e.g. 'SQL', 'SQL/SSIS', 'SQL/SSRS'). If you just use basic tags ('SQL', 'SSIS', 'SSRS') then you get a flat view.
Google mail is also currently limited to displaying matches on single labels, whereas a proper tagging system should be able to search multiple tags, which is, of course, the effect being achieved by the hierarchy type tags.
Derek
December 16, 2008 at 4:22 pm
I need to look at Google mail. I've heard it searches well, and it should. Right now my account is an archive where I send stuff I want to keep :w00t:
December 16, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Steve Jones - Editor (12/16/2008)
I need to look at Google mail. I've heard it searches well, and it should. Right now my account is an archive where I send stuff I want to keep :w00t:
gmail search is not as good as regular google search. For some reason the gmail engine is different from the regular google engine: in particular partial word matches, if you search for "book" instead of "books" it will not match.
December 16, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Now that sounds like Live search! 😛
December 17, 2008 at 2:53 am
Cade Roux (12/16/2008)
Steve Jones - Editor (12/16/2008)
I need to look at Google mail. I've heard it searches well, and it should. Right now my account is an archive where I send stuff I want to keep :w00t:gmail search is not as good as regular google search. For some reason the gmail engine is different from the regular google engine: in particular partial word matches, if you search for "book" instead of "books" it will not match.
I must admit I rarely search my personal mail in that way, since the tags work so well, so have never noticed.
Steve, my account is also mainly used as an archive... 🙂
Derek
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