Hi all, I've been doing some thinking (sorry!) about the way tags and topics are being explored in different ways in different systems (Nautilus, Epiphany, GThumb, Evolution Contacts, not to mention those online).
I'd like to see a GNOME-wide tag/topic system eventually, but we should get some definitions sorted out first. Please reply with any comments about these definitions. I've based then on what I would use tags/topics for *after* they've been associated with an object. Tag: any label that can be used as metadata for an object. ---------------------------------------------------------- This can include basically anything. Take a photo of a group of friends standing on a beach, and you can tag it with the name of each friend in the photo, plus "photo", "beach", "sand", "water", "sunshine", etc. If you ever want to find some photo of your friend Jack you can just say "find all objects with tags 'photo' and 'Jack'". It's great for situations where you want a list of objects because you're not after a specific object necessarily. Or you want to look at all objects with certain properties - not just one. Topic: the label you would think of first when trying to find an object. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This definition may sound to have been written backwards, but try it out for a bit before criticising. Imagine you are trying to find a specific photo again. Not just any photo of a beach, or of your friend Jack, you want that specific photo. What labels would you think of first? Perhaps "Photos", "Friends", "Beach". You could say that a topic describes the main characteristics of an object as if the user was trying to organise their objects using the minimum amount of meta-information, but the real definition is what I gave first. Note that, by what I've described, tags are user-independent and pretty haphazard. They're just properties of the object, which should be observable by all. Topics are things that are user-dependent, and rely on how the user's mind works when looking for something. Now, do these definitions seem to fit everyone? I've left things like "keywords" undefined, and I've assumed that "categories" is the same as "topics", but feel free to argue. :) See ya, Peter. _______________________________________________ epiphany-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/epiphany-list
