This will be the first in probably an expanding set of blog posts detailing my crazy ideas for various kinds of technical hackery – this way, if I don’t get around to building it, at least I can claim that I had the idea first.
Tag-tree: What and Why:
* Bountyup.com (see my crazy startup blog thread, soon to be written) uses the now-ever-popular tagging metaphor for classification of items. However, I *still* want to be able to pretend to have a traditional taxonomy on the front page, represented as a tree (roughly speaking). Rather than build one and manually classify all bounties, or (even worse) force the *users* to classify them, I have a few choices:
a) Map tags to categories in some one-to-many or combined-key-to-many sort of way
b) Show every tag as a single flat category
c) Make a tree out of the tags
I’ve decided to try and do the latter (yes, I realize this is one of those impossible web2.0-type dreams, since by their very nature folksonomies and taxonomies are different beast. I’m going to try anyway, and at the very least this will give me a starting point for (a) above).
My proposed algorithm:
1. Most commonly used tags become the top-level folders.
2. Tags used in conjunction become secondary folders.
3. Items tagged with a secondary tag and no primary tag will be disambiguated, if possible, by the following steps:
a. If other items have been tagged by the same user with this secondary tag, as well as a primary tag, the matching primary tag will be assumed.
b. If not, (eventually) content analysis will be used to disambiguate (full-text index of other secondary-tagged content to determine the appropriate primary tag).
c. In the meantime, show the item in both locations, and possibly flag for manual review. (Maybe a cool tag-supporting UI that suggests possible primary tags to a secondary tag?)
Drawbacks, Advantages, and other Characteristics of the Approach:
* The hierarchy will constantly be shifting, since a secondary tag will become a primary tag simply by becoming more frequently used than the primary.
* Perhaps this should start out as an advanced or even admin-only view of the data?
* It’s possible (likely?) that there will end up with either a.) thousands of primary tags, or b.) thousands of ambiguated items with only secondary tags.
Let’s see how it goes.
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