Comments on: Folksonomies: How we can improve the tags http://pinds.com/2005/01/23/folksonomies-how-we-can-improve-the-tags/ spiritual entrepreneurship, personal growth, internet, food, politics. Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:13:03 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Lawrence Krubner http://pinds.com/2005/01/23/folksonomies-how-we-can-improve-the-tags/comment-page-1/#comment-473 Lawrence Krubner Sun, 23 Jan 2005 16:10:01 +0000 http://pinds.com/2007/07/27/folksonomies-how-we-can-improve-the-tags#comment-473 The easy part is the "suggest tags for me". I've done that with my own little project, accumulist.com, and I've an open API so that anyone can get the tags from Accumulist and have them auto-suggested. The hard part is hierarchy. How can this be auto-determined? This seems, more than most other things you mention, to scream out for human experts. I did think at one point that hierarchy could be determined from relatedness, but my own experience on accumulist.com showed me how wrong I was. I thought that if you looked at all the tags that were used in conjunction with other tags, ordered by their frequency, you could get a pretty good idea of hierarchy. But on Accumulist.com we've 5 intelligent people trying to tag things in an intelligent manner and yet, to take on example, <a href="http://www.accumulist.com/index.php?whatPage=showRelatedTags&whatTag=xml">for the tag "xml"</a>, we get these as related items: software, rss, apple, ld times, quicktime, web 2.0, api, tags, microsoft, web design, podcasting, google, smil, windows, podcast, webdevelopment, itunes, ajax, mp3, mac, dave winer, amazon, podcasts, itunes My friend Peter's interest in podcasting tilts the results. I think all the other things you mentioned will be solved, but hierarchy remains unsolvable without the help of human experts. The easy part is the "suggest tags for me". I’ve done that with my own little project, accumulist.com, and I’ve an open API so that anyone can get the tags from Accumulist and have them auto-suggested.

The hard part is hierarchy. How can this be auto-determined? This seems, more than most other things you mention, to scream out for human experts.

I did think at one point that hierarchy could be determined from relatedness, but my own experience on accumulist.com showed me how wrong I was. I thought that if you looked at all the tags that were used in conjunction with other tags, ordered by their frequency, you could get a pretty good idea of hierarchy. But on Accumulist.com we’ve 5 intelligent people trying to tag things in an intelligent manner and yet, to take on example, <a href="http://www.accumulist.com/index.php?whatPage=showRelatedTags&whatTag=xml">for the tag "xml"</a>, we get these as related items:

software, rss, apple, ld times, quicktime, web 2.0, api, tags, microsoft, web design, podcasting, google, smil, windows, podcast, webdevelopment, itunes, ajax, mp3, mac, dave winer, amazon, podcasts, itunes

My friend Peter’s interest in podcasting tilts the results.

I think all the other things you mentioned will be solved, but hierarchy remains unsolvable without the help of human experts.

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