Tag Families

August 14, 2007 12:09 AM

A request for 'tag groups' and 'tag aliases'. Explained inside.
posted by Gyan to Feature Requests at 12:09 AM (32 comments total)

There's a lot of variation in how posters tag their FPPs. A post on a religious festival in India may carry the tag 'India' or it may carry 'Indian' or it may not have either but have only the name of the festival. Even that name, being a transliteration, may have multiple spellings in circulation. In this case, searching for a particular spelling may not net all the relevant posts. In order to make searching more productive and efficient, I am requesting the implementation of 'tag groups' and tag aliases'. The labels are hopefully self-explanatory, but here's an illustration with current front page posts as inspiration:

Tag Groups

1)(the nonintuitive) 'salarynegotiation', 'salary', 'wages', 'pay', 'renumeration', 'paycheck'...etc

2)'brain', 'neurology', 'neuroscience', 'mind'...etc

Tag Aliases -

1)'salary', 'salaries';

2)'God', 'Dios', 'Dieu'...

3) 'oceanrowing', 'rowing'

4) 'table tennis', 'ping pong', 'ping-pong'
posted by Gyan at 12:09 AM on August 14, 2007

1. How would this be implemented?

2. Do you mean something like Flickr's tag clusters?
posted by vacapinta at 12:20 AM on August 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

Tag aliases seem easier to implement. During the preview of submission, the engine would find the most similar tags for each of the ones being assigned to the prospective post, using substring similarity, and then offer the poster either the choice to add the tag to the tag alias set or change one's own tag to an alias already present (thus avoiding proliferation). Moderators can also, naturally, have manual facility.

Not so sure about tag groups, but some AI experts may have some ideas. The Flickr clusters seem pretty similar to the tag group idea. How do they assign a tag to a cluster? That may be a good guide.
posted by Gyan at 12:33 AM on August 14, 2007

A post on a religious festival in India may carry the tag 'India' or it may carry 'Indian' or it may not have either but have only the name of the festival.

Just search for posts by hadjiboy. There they all are. Problem solved!
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 12:34 AM on August 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

Deciding what a similar tags are is the magic pixie dust step (:

In my corner of the internerd, I do tag stuff; and with aliases, I have it set up so that there are definitive tags, which have associated aliases. If you enter an alias as a tag, it gets turned into the equivalent definitive one.

Then, if you ask for the tag page for an alias, it totters off and looks for things tagged with the corresponding definitive tag. Nice.

But yeah - setting up aliases is bgrah! particularly if you have a bunch of different people tagging with different ideas of how things should be tagged. On my interblag, it's a little more straightforward since everything is tagged in much the same way to start with; which is the core of the problem that's looking to be solved by having aliases...
posted by ambilevous at 12:40 AM on August 14, 2007

bgrah!

This is an exclamation I have never seen before, but I am very much in favour of.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:47 AM on August 14, 2007

Authority control! Authority control!
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:58 AM on August 14, 2007

Or people could just use better tags.
posted by smackfu at 5:25 AM on August 14, 2007

What robocop said.
posted by box at 6:11 AM on August 14, 2007

shit
cock
shitcock
posted by quonsar at 6:49 AM on August 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

Insert argument about evolutionary folksonomies. Snarky comment about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Something about beans.
posted by grateful at 7:16 AM on August 14, 2007

BEANS ARE DELICIOUS SOURCES OF DARK FIBER
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:23 AM on August 14, 2007 [2 favorites]

Setting aside the difficulties of the pixie-dust "which tags go together" stage, I've thought for a while that some sort of set-of-tags function would be handy. My dream version would have (a) a bunch of defined sets of tags that is easy to supplement/amend/whatever (probably just from an admin or tag-specialist interface), and (b) the ability to search by precise rather than fuzzy tag when desired.

We've talked a little behind the scenes about about tagging stuff, but I'm not sure if anything's really on the hotplate right now.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:47 AM on August 14, 2007

STAVROS DID YOU REALIZE THAT MOST OF THE FIBER IN THE UNIVERSE IS THIS MYSTERIOUS DARK FIBER? FIBROLOGISTS HAVE DETERMINED THAT MASSIVE FIBER OBJECTS (MAFIOS) LIKE BITS OF WOOD ACCOUNT FOR ONLY A SMALL AMOUNT OF DARK FIBER WHICH MUST EXIST PREDOMINANTLY IN MORE EXOTIC FORMS LIKE BEANIONS STOP
posted by Mister_A at 8:00 AM on August 14, 2007 [2 favorites]

tag groups and tag clusters are so nerdy that I don't even understand how they work on delicious, and I've been using that service daily for three years. I have no clue how to set it up or why I would.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:06 AM on August 14, 2007

How about a flag for "fix tags"?
posted by smackfu at 8:07 AM on August 14, 2007 [4 favorites]

Tag aliases, on the other hand, are pretty easy to implement and one of these days they will magically appear when pb puts five minutes into solving the problem.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:07 AM on August 14, 2007

(And of course Jessamyn would be the one to respond to that flag.)
posted by smackfu at 8:07 AM on August 14, 2007

Smackfu's suggestion seems to be the only workable one, but we might need to clone an army of Jessamyns. Wow. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by that thought.
posted by nowonmai at 8:34 AM on August 14, 2007

as far as the back end, we already have an admin tag find and replace feature. So, for things that have a few dominant and a whole mess of lesser tags [911 9/11 sept11 september11 septembereleventh for one progression - newyorkcity and nyc is another] I usually find/replace the rarely-used ones with the more standard tags. If we had a tag suggester on the posting page to encourage people to tag their post with georgebush instead of georgewbush, for example, I think that would help a LOT of this.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:55 AM on August 14, 2007

Just tag everything using the dewey decimal system, like I don't.
posted by blue_beetle at 9:00 AM on August 14, 2007

We (and by we I mean you) just need to tag every post with a Library of Congress number. That'll fix everything.
posted by bonehead at 9:07 AM on August 14, 2007

Sure, then instead of "George W Bush" for a tag, we can just look up the handy: "973.931 B 62". Wow, that's so much easier!
posted by misha at 11:01 AM on August 14, 2007

Of course! And you can look up the subject numbers in the handy card catalogue on the second floor.
posted by bonehead at 11:21 AM on August 14, 2007

Just give everything the same tag, for simplicity.
posted by Mister_A at 12:32 PM on August 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

As a member of the MeFi Tagging Posse (shines badge), I would love some sort of tag suggester. When tagging old posts I often do the whole 'gwb, georgebush, georgewbush' thing (and holy crap are there a lot of those posts). But I would hate to have to constantly be updating the authority file.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 12:47 PM on August 14, 2007

Compared to other tagging schemes, we've been doing an impressive job.
posted by Smart Dalek at 1:42 PM on August 14, 2007

I think it'd be cool to have some kind of system where we could all add tags to posts, instead of just the OP.

Advantage: The tags would better reflect what the community thinks it should be tagged as, and would therefore make it easier to search later.

Disadvantage: People would add LOLtags.

Maybe have a second tag area for commenter-submitted tags?
posted by Many bubbles at 3:13 PM on August 14, 2007

Many bubbles, you may have missed that we're slowly trying to move towards this. Right now we have it so that your mutual contacts can add tags to each other's posts. So if I add you and you add me as a contyact, we can tag each other's posts, but only the OP can edit tags on their post, I think.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:20 PM on August 14, 2007

Really? Cool! So that's what contacts are for.
posted by Many bubbles at 3:33 PM on August 14, 2007

Just give everything the same tag, for simplicity.

And I know exactly which one.
posted by hangashore at 3:49 PM on August 14, 2007

Really? Cool! So that's what contacts are for.

That's not what they were designed for, but that's what they are going to be used for.
posted by philomathoholic at 7:42 PM on August 14, 2007