Re: Hierarchical tags

From: David Huynh <dfhuynh_at_csail.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:18:36 -0400

I think providing a way to browse data hierarchically through
user-assigned tags is the first item of business. This will look like a
normal folder tree view.

We can also provide tag completion not just at the time of tag
assignment but also at the time of recalling items using tags. So, I can
start typing a tag

    f

and PB would complete

    f|
       irefox (39)
       riend (48)

then I type i and hit tab

    firefox

now when I type comma and space, I get other tags of things tagged as
firefox

    firefox, |
                extension (18)
                flaws (6)
                hacks (13)
                javascript (2)

David


Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:

> Brett Zamir wrote:
>
>> And how about a browseable hierarchy for tags as well, drawing from
>> Princeton's WordNet perhaps (as one option for those who didn't want to
>> start from scratch), in order to allow the user to come across
>> results for
>> similar concepts (e.g., while browsing for the tag "pizza", one could
>> easily
>> get to tags for "pasta", etc.). This hierarchy could be editable
>> along the
>> lines of (and even interfaceable with) Wikipedia's category structure.
>
>
> I've been thinking long and hard about this. Probably even too much.
> Clearly, the lack of relationships between tags is damaging,
> especially when the tag space starts to grow.
>
> The problem, though, is that the relationships between those tags
> should be folksonomized themselves, or we can run into trouble on a
> globally distribute tag space.
>
> For example: suppose you tag something with "blog" and I tag the same
> thing with "blogs". The edit distance between the label of our two
> tags is small enough that I can run a levenshtein distance and present
> you (or me or somebody else) with a potential relationship field
>
> blogs --- [edit text here ]---> blog
>
> then you can type "plural of" and it becomes another statement. At
> that point, now we have a relationship between your tag and mine,
> clearly typed as a relationship. Later somebody else might say
>
> "plural of" -(is a)-> "collapsable property"
>
> so that the system might know that when you find blogs or blog they
> really mean the same thing. (in OWL terms, a "collapsable property"
> does the same of an OWL equivalence but in the folksological space)
>
> The same emergence can be done by running such a distance against
> wordnet, which would yield the ability to draw equivalences between
> tags and words in wordnet... but again, those relationships are
> *YOURS*, not global, then I can decide whether or not I agree or
> disagree or even slightly want to differentiate myself from your
> vision... defaulting to agreeing which is by far the most common case
> in folksological spaces.
>
> I'm not inclined to introduce something that can't scale to an entire
> world of people tagging... and not tagging things apple or blog, but
> things like abortion or war or holocaust or religion or terrorism,
> where meaning *and* relationships are highly dependent on the personal
> context.
>
> And yes, there is an entire virgin research field on its own on doing
> non-DL reasoning on a folksological space and I am very interested in
> that research area myself, but tying tags to wordnet won't scale
> socially, therefore has very little appeal to me even if immediately
> would be useful.
>
> That said, this is only my personal opinion and I don't speak for the
> entire group... and remember, this is an open source project so
> patches are always welcome :-)
>
Received on Fri Oct 28 2005 - 17:12:53 EDT