[Tagdb] Single and multi-word tags / swarming and spreading

[Juan Cristian Vera]

Hi all;

My name is Juan Cristian & I've been lurking for a couple of months. I 
thought this would be a good time to jump in:

I designed a social schema for work last November. Our main goal in 
making a schema from scratch was to be able to do some collaboration 
that exposes a sort of atomic trust-based transparency model, allowing 
you & chosen communities in which you participate to tag your stuff on 
our site (internal stuff, you construct within the site - I call it a 
"flamazon" model - the marketing guys don't think that's a good 
word...), and see other tags based on the three-way trust relationship 
between the owner of the tagged object, the tagger, & the viewer...

This behavior would look a little like "swarming", except that you can 
set the reslution of the tag cloud you see while you navigate - whether 
you are tryinhg to reach somethign based on your tags alone, those of 
one or more communities you belong to, or the coud at large.

I started reading the tagdb list when I first launched into this 
project, not knowing much about tagging as a user. Since November, 
however, my browsing habits, and the way I look at classification in the 
first place, have been profoundly affected by practice in tagging and 
some of the thought-provoking discussions on this list. To wit, the 
first one that I ran into was a post about commas and spaces in tags. At 
the time, it made a lot of sense that multi-word labels should be 
supported, but the more I tag, especially in del.icio.us, the less I 
care about having terms I see as bound together stored as a unit.

I respectfully disagree with Tim. I think the relatedness of two words 
that one comes to see as one term is a form of clustering, almost the 
beginnings of rhetorical structure. I mean, if I see a picture of a dog 
house and label it with these two tags, dog & house, I will be quite 
able to discern when I go looking for something what are pictures of 
dogs in peole houses as opposed to dog houses. The same problem occurs 
in spoken language, not just with adjacent terms, but as well with 
homonyms. The fact that one term is subordinate to another, like a 
sattleite paragraph in rhetorical structure theory, does not make the 
two terms need to be bound more tightly tha by coincidence in the single 
tagged object. In fact, in omance languages they are not. "dog house" 
may seem like a single word in english, but this composite noun, in 
Spanish would be "la casa del perro", or without a contraction, "la casa 
de el perro" with an article and a preposition that are implicit in 
English, possibly implying a closer relation between "dog" & "house" 
than there actually is.

Best,


Juan Cristián