That said, having seen some of the centralized, intricate tagging systems out there, that let you filter down from Earth to one specific ant in the blink of an eye, that's what I think of when I think of "tagging" that's really effective. YMMV, but I would argue that if you can't type in 10 different tags and get 1 result that's exactly what you're looking for, tags aren't really delivering on their promise.
note that it was built as a memory aid so that you had a chance of finding something again later. your idea that it needs be exact, perfect, and precise or it won’t work is silly.
Definitely agree that if you're mainly tagging for your future self, you can derive tons of value without constraints. Whereas if you have people tagging for others, that needs more support.
Although, if you're so inclined, you could also view these as a continuum --- with "personal" tagging being the apex of centralized consensus, and having to increasingly labor for consensus with every added user in the system.
The thing above is much closer to what some of the librarians were really into.
they have their own description, their get moderated, other people can add tags, they can report them, you can alias tags, see related tags, and get feedback on them.
disclaimer: most of these image board are NSFW.
These are easy to establish, but can be quite difficult to maintain and rationalise.
Yeah, it's not, really. And thankfully.
del.icio.us is specifically listed as an example.
(I'm aware that you're more than casually familiar with del.icio.us. I'm just confused by your response.)
Are you doing anything related these days?
I've been generally inclined toward adopting an existing taxonomy (or at least a usefully-sized portion of it). Unfortunately, many of the more common ones are copyright-encumbered (e.g., Dewey classification). Library of Congress classification and subject headings are available. If somewhat unweildy.
A few of my tilted windmills...
https://web.archive.org/web/20050601013309/http://shirky.com...
It made librarians pretty mad. At the end of the day, though, putting things like 'ontology' and 'keywords you type so you can find your bookmarks again later' in tension was a category error.
What's being optimized is number of books on the shelf.
Libraries organise their content. And in a print-and-paper world, that content has locational specificity.
You don't have to organise materials by topic, but in an open-stacks model that's almost always preferable, and it has utility with closed stacks as well.[1] Where the indexing system can provide a space-transgressing capability of cross references, even that was originally bound printed volumes or journals, though as the 19th century progressed, increasingly the more open to random-access, but still locationalised index card within cabinets.
I'd recently submitted the Hathi Trust archives of the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress, 1866--2007 to HN: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000072049 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31421398)
Having read A.R. Spofford's reports, the physicality of the archive dominates --- during his tenure the collection was housed in the North wing of the US Capitol, adjacent to what is now the Old Senate Chambers (directly west, best I can tell, with three floors and presumably some basement space). The collection had burnt shortly previously (1851), and beginning in the 1870s, Spofford was urging Congress to dedicate a building to the archive, and complained incessently of the challenges in even enumerating the holdings due to crowding of books and other materials --- 800,000 volumes in a space meant for 200,000.
The new building opened the year of Spofford's retirement, in 1897. (Spofford himself lived to 1908, remaining as Chief Assistant Librarian, and presumably enjoying the main fruit of his labours in the Jefferson Building.
Following Spofford, attention seems to turn to cataloguing. I'm reading those reports now, which expand greatly from the earlier brief form (about 6 pages during Spofford's term). I'm interested to see how that discussion develops.
It is made clear that the organisation borrows heavily from Francis Bacon's trinary distinction of history (or memory), poetry (or creative works), and philosophy, or reason, acquired through the Thomas Jefferson collection's organisation. (Jefferson's personal library re-established the Library after an earlier fire of British origin in 1812.)
I've also looked at other ontologies --- Diderot, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and several library classifications (Dewey, LoC, Colon, ...).
As with principles of truth, classifications should be useful, serving a purpose. Organising and using a collection should presumably be key amongst those purposes.
Hierarchical classifciations, like metaphors, melt if pushed loudly enough.
In kicking around some ideas for an information management ... thing ... which I variously call KFC (Krell Functional/Fucking Context), docfs, and/or webfs (latter two should be self evident, see Plan9's 9p for strong precedent). One notion is that search affords identity, in the sense that a search which is sufficiently defined to result in a single work is an identity function for that work. That's mated with the notion that a search can return a different value of results: 0, 1, a few, and many. "Few" and "many" are relative to the ability to work with the results, they're not a fixed quantity, and will vary by characteristics of the system and its user. For a skilled researcher and good tools, I'd suggest "few" might range from an order of magnitude of 10 -- 1,000. Capable of being winnowed further, with effort. "Many" might be 100 and above (there's overlap, yes), to million, billions, or more.
For purposes of this discussion, values from 2 -- 9 equal 10 ;-)
A search result is nothing (empty set), one (identity), or > 1 (list). Where a list is presented, further subdivisions might be suggested: publication dates, authors, subjects, publishers, concepts, statistically significant words or phrases, titles... At some point, those subdivisions would likely provide an identity.
My thinking is that a filesystem-like expression of qualifiers might identify a given work, or set of works. Or the empty set. Something like:
/docfs/au:fitzgerald/ti:gatsby
/docfs/dt:600-799/kw:transsubstantiation
There might be more paths to Gatsby:
/docfs/dt:1915-1930/kw:west egg/kw:daisy
/docfs/dt:1980--1989/su:machine learning
And amongst the reasons why the US LoC classification and subject headings are useful is not that they are perfect and a single authority, but because over more than a century of use and adaptation they've acquired the institutional tools and processes to manage change and ambiguity reasonably well.
That, and the fact that they're freely available. Albeit in inconvenient forms.
(Another project I've been working on in fits and starts.)
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Notes:
1. Among alternatives I'm aware of is the SuDoc classification, used by the U.S. Supervisor of Documents, which is arranged by government department* and date. Which turns out to be a useful way for grouping that corpus physically.