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Why are tags considered binary?
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Posted by Lothar Scholz
Mar 30, 2017 at 10:49 PM
I mean either a tag is assigned to some information or not.
Lets assume i have a photo showing horses in a forrest. The horses are in the foreground and huge.
Why can’t i tag this photo as “#animals” and “#nature” with a 100% animals but only a 50% nature.
Until we have fine working AI this might help a bit in relevance searching.
Is there any information manager that can do this?
I haven’t seen it used anywhere. It just came up my mind while programming on my own pet project.
Posted by Magenda
Mar 31, 2017 at 07:50 AM
I think that is a great idea!
But then, I don’t write software.
Hmm, you could have the software make venn diagrams showing the overlap between tags. Not all “horse” would be in “nature”.
YIKES!
Posted by Magenda
Mar 31, 2017 at 07:50 AM
I think that is a great idea!
But then, I don’t write software.
Hmm, you could have the software make venn diagrams showing the overlap between tags. Not all “horse” would be in “nature”.
YIKES!
Posted by Luhmann
Mar 31, 2017 at 08:07 AM
I’ve never seen anything like this, but I have seen two uses of tags that might be relevant: The first is “tag clouds” which show tags by how often they appear. There are WordPress plugins to do this for post tags. Although it still remains binary for individual posts, the aggregate data does therefore give greater strength to those tags which appear most frequently. The second is the use of “sub tags” in apps like Bear where you could do something like: #primary/horse #secondary/nature. I find that the folks at Bear have implemented sub tags in a very intelligent way that makes me wish other apps did the same.
Posted by Paul Korm
Mar 31, 2017 at 11:43 AM
I would imagine there is no standard for “tag” or “tagging”. There are some ancient RFCs on the topic, but they are somewhat technical (e.g., how to handle tags in UNICODE).
Developers have different metaphors for tagging: “tags are groups”—DEVONthink and Apple—“tags are labels”, etc. But always @Lothar is right, “tags” are binary.
I think what you’re looking for might be a concept for “attributes” or “properties”: a {label, value} pair. This is the basis of XML, Apple’s .plists, and so on. The “label” is static, the “value” can vary. So you could have {animals, 100} and {nature, 50}, and so on.
Tinderbox uses attribute data structures of this sort. Some mind-mapping apps do as well.