> While I love a nice orderly hierarchy, I'm not sure that tags > necessarily lend themselves to them. Certainly they can, but they also > lend themselves to non-hierarchical grouping (hence bundles at > del.icio.us). A discussion of this trend can be found here: > http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html (I had another, > even more pertinent article but have misplaced the link). Perhaps > bundlable bundles of tags would be a way to go much the way flickr.com > uses collections would satisfy highly organized folks of both the > hierarchical and non-hierarchical type?
You know... It occurs to me that a heck of a lot of the problems we users have with tagging and hierarchy and ontologies and folksonomies and all -- which cause us to try to tweak them like this to make them more useful -- all stems from a single false presumption reified in code. That is: you can only use one at a time. If it were possible to specify unions and intersections of tags, much of what one wants heirarchy for goes away. I don't need a "work.gossip" tag and a "school.gossip" tag, I just need to be able to specify "return to me the intersection of 'school' and 'gossip'." In fact, I suspect all hierarchy is actually just intersections. The problem, of course, is that that sort of operation is very costly. -- Siderea _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
