Comments on: personal ontology

By: Bazaarz

Bazaarz — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 22:02:56 +0000

Tagging — search is the problem

There’s a lively debate going on between Hugh, Sig and others too numerous to mention on the tagging thing as an alternative to tree-structure style databases. The discussions are interesting in the context of new business models but that’s it.…

By: Forthcoming

Forthcoming — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 20:33:04 +0000

imprecision it is (tags continued)

Excellent, fun, make-me-smile discussion going on here! Foot-in-the-mouthishly I suggested that voluminous and imprecise tagging would do the trick for any kind of object or issue, leaving precision to a delivery method of iffy-tags-interception. That …

By: Ric

Ric — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 15:34:33 +0000

Having said that, BTW, I agree that for most things there would be an original set of tags that would match existing categories to a large extent, if only to make it easier for people to change or augment existing search methods and habits.

By: Ric

Ric — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 15:31:28 +0000

Just back to Hamish’s comments (I’m not realy picking on you Hamish!) about his Audi rear light. The search by tagging gives you a smaller list every time you add another tag, so if you neglected to tell the search that you were looking for a LEFT rear light for your Audi, then you would have a list longer than one item, but your item would be on it. You only have to specify enough tags to get to a workable list; a list short enough for a ‘sequential read’ where enough information is visible to uniquely identify your item — like all your wife’s tags for the tail light perhaps!
If anybody could add new tags, then ultimately the item would become more readily available via different routes. If the first person (after the object-creator) found it by ultimately doing a sequential read through a hundred similar items, and tagged it with things that would have helped him (or her in the wife’s case), then the next person will probably find it in a list of fifty — and add some of ‘their’ tags — etc, etc.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 14:44:42 +0000

Let me make this real simple:
1) top-down hierarchies / categories are good for uniquely identifying and referring to nouns (physical objects and locations).
2) tags are good at creating and shaping the “meaning” of these nouns…Your personal *schema* for an object or idea if the tagging is local to a system you solely control (like a personal blog)…The social “conversation” if tags are contributed by the crowd and viewed in public.
3) when folks try to make boring inanimate objects “mean something” with tags–or just as bad–attempt to predict the future and impose their intepretations of reality on others via categories–bad things happen.
Rules of Thumb: a) if you can have an interesting conversation about it, tag it. b) if having a conversation about it might adversely effect your chances of getting laid, slap a category on it and get on with your life.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 05:54:36 +0000

Hugh,
I don’t see how something like del.icio.us helps you add the right tags for someone else.
You can add your tags to things you find. But how did you find them? To do that you need to know the tags which someone else used?
Saying something is pretty feasible doesn’t make it so.
Agreed tags are valuable and allow you to bypass a company’s pre-approval. But lets not get too carried away here: There is a big difference between finding the exact something you need (as in business) and finding something that might be useful (as in del.icio.us).
Tags are at their best when used as a way of re-finding ‘found things’, or of discovering things other people who ‘tag like you’ have found.
I am not saying tags aren’t useful, if I thought that I wouldn’t have spent 3 years of my life trying to create a tag based file system.

By: MarkN

MarkN — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 05:35:18 +0000

I think there is certainly big company action taking place in terms of outfits like Technorati or del.ici.ous trying to establish themselves as the defacto aggregator/mediator.
The nature of the beast right now is that such mediation is required both technically and financially. RSS is after all just a file full of data sitting on a web server waiting to be downloaded. It far from a proactive thing. Zealously tagging and metadataizing the shit out of it isn’t going to make it any more proactive.
For proactiveness nowadays we have to rely on advances in RSS reader sophistication or on ever more sophisticated aggregators like Technorati. I am not a fan of either of these alternatives, although the realist in me knows that this is how its will be.
This is why I appreciate the fact that folks like Sig are trying to push the envelope out to where I am.
Islands of data
Evolving connections abound
Meaning for all

By: hugh macleod

hugh macleod — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 04:59:09 +0000

I imagine one could add their wife’s tags to their own simply by using something like del.ici.ous…
The thing is, all of this is pretty feasible stuff. You just build it and watch it work… or not work.
It’s like the blogosphere.… it’ll just happen (or not) by itself.… no big company’s pre-approval needed.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 04:35:42 +0000

Hugh,
How do you feel about being a facilitator? Seems that your visibility to a broad spectrum of readers is bring people who otherwise wouldn’t talk together.
21 and 19 comments respectively is a little more than normal right? Perhaps because you have stumbled across a topic that needs a forum?

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 04:29:58 +0000

Sig,
I agree with Hamish, here.
How do you add your wife’s tags to yours exactly?
Is she sitting with you when you tag it? Because if she isn’t I can’t see how she can add her tags, she won’t be able to find your “Campagnolo Record crankset” because until she tags it with her tags she can’t find it, and until she can find it she can’t tag it!
You certainly can’t tag it with her tags for her: you don’t know what her tags are, and if you think you do you are setting your self up as the ‘expert’.
This is a classic Chicken and Egg problem.

By: sig

sig — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 03:43:49 +0000

Hamish,
no, no Add your wife’s tags to yours, both sets are the tags for the crankset, and for good measure ask your Japanese neighbour (if you have one) to add a few more!
Then you have the beginning of a good description for the crankset that will be adequate for hardcore cyclists, the baker on the corner and perhaps a few Japanese as well! Not to say the id/name would say a lot more about the stuff than “REC-987262.PE.098″!
(That’s after all what Linnaeus and the Periodic Table try to attain, adding implisit knowledge!)
Then you may avoid having to exchange manuals, agree on “standards” have governments “standarization boards” and whatnot…
German Phds… hehe… Albert Einstein was one (until he became Swiss that is) and he certainly broke off from the standard thinking

By: Hamish

Hamish — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 02:40:21 +0000

Hi Sig!
I actually agree that tags are fully useful. No doubt about it. My issue is that if I described the crank set, I might mention useful things like number of sprockets, any mounting pecularities, units of measure, and so on. My wife, who is not technically illiterate, but not a cyclist, would not. Now, for her purposes, her description is good enough, but for my purpose, it would be inadequate.
Now, from a subjective point of view both are valid, but from an objective point of view, a non-expert may be incapable of creating a view that would fulfill the needs of all users. Thus standardardised tags, I guess Hugh’s prime tags, or let’s use an un-PC word, expert tags, are needed… I was thinking about this last time we spoke, and I mentioned a tag directory or meta-format.
Ehh. Maybe I spent too long locked up with German Phds. =-)

By: ForwardMarkets

ForwardMarkets — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 02:35:47 +0000

The Yin and Yang of Tagging: Specification vs Interpretation

As I monitor the ongoing discussion of tags, prime tags, personal ontology it occurs to me that there are two sides to the practice and practicality of tagging. The first side is the specification of tags.

By: sig

sig — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 02:04:12 +0000

Hi Hamish!
Let’s fill up Hugh’s storage capacity, here’s another long one! (this is too good a discussion to stop because of Hugh’s blog-storage budget!
“Captured all the attributes” — not always necessary says I. “Tartan, skirt, male, Macleod, wear” should pinpoint Hugh’s Scottish attire (he says he has no such though), even if it far from captures all the attributes of such a fine garment!
“Descriptive process” is another crux — that is something quite different from person too person.
Try this: Describe a “Campagnolo Record crankset” by tags that comes to your cyclist’s mind, as many as possible. Then let your wife do the same (non-cyclist I presume?) and add those.
Her tag-set would not ruin your tag-set, but it would (especially in combination with yours) make it easier to “find” the object by somebody of her mindset.
Same issue with “linear analytical way” — my wife is definitely less linear than I (seems to me sometimes and thus we may misunderstand each other. Better then if she used not only her “tags” but also “tags” that I could relate to, and vice versa of course!
(This makes a case for letting all add tags to any object… posts in a blog for example… note to self, will add that to the “experiment”.)
In other words, let the descriptive process be free from constraints and let the “object-seeker” free to apply his/her own logic without having to assimilate the logic of the “object-creator” or read the “manual” (as the employees of Audi has to do)!
“Exchange information between unrelated parties”, well, then you would have to exchange “manuals” (or impose and distribute standard tags) first, and that is what is lacking when people get on TV debate programs… and that’s why we have lawyers
Apply the “Campa crankset experiment” from above to this too: Ask your aunt if she understands precisely what you describe if you use only “standard cyclists lingo and terms”, then let your wife pipe in with her “tags” and see if not that would be helpful!
In the end it seems we disagree (for the time being — I think you may use “iffy-blobs-intersecting” (tags superimposed) and give as good or better results and at the same time free people from manuals, training, endless discussions about standards, lawyers and deliver world peace
Of course, the current systems thinking and software would choke… but so what I say

By: Hamish

Hamish — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 01:09:22 +0000

Hi Sig!
Hmmm. Not sure. I agree that if you keep tagging long enough you can give a human friendly search mechanism, but I worry about a couple of things.
1. I come back to the “tag-not-imagined” problem. If I can describe lots of things that I can think of, I can reinforce and search my metal model of the car, and that is useful, but there still has to be discovery process to be sure that you have captured all the attributes. If I cannot imagine it, it does not mean that the car does not need it? That doesn’t rule out the useful of tags for search and retrieval, but I think that you would have to have a support mechanism for the original descriptive process.
2. Tagging is flexible, but it is iterative, and some complex problems are best tackled in a linearly analytical way. Only some, I hasten to add. The cut over point is when the iteration is going to take as long or longer to produce an evolved result as the linear analysis. This is less of a problem if the tagging will autogenerate, and this may be where a machine based approach is useful, like Googles language translation. An alternative is to use the tagging approach to map information that never HAD a structure to begin with. (Then it works very well.)
3. (Yeah, I know, I said two.) To my mind the role of tagging is to associate standard data formats that otherwise are not easily handled. For example, if you are trying to have both an Audi part number, and a Toyota part number in the same system, then the “light” “car” rear” “passenger” “Make” Model” “Year” is an imposed taxonomy on other data. Car parts aren’t that good an example, but many engineering parts are standard, but are then refererred to by proprietary system numbers. This would allow reuse.
I am still of the mind that in the case when there is a need for information exchange between two previously unrelated external parties, then the only way to manage this would be to impose standard tags, or use a previously agreed and imposed standard, like EDI or SWIFT, etc. I suppose arguably that is what in fact many of the XML business standards intend to achieve?
Not arguing agsinst the usefulness of tagging more that the tagging approach is not in itself sufficient for all circumstances.