Hi all, > > I'd like to see a GNOME-wide tag/topic system eventually, but we > > should get some definitions sorted out first.
I second that. I dream of tagging all virtual resource I deal with, and I hope that someday it's possible. I don't agree with the tag vs. topic thing though, they are the same thing IMO. I think of a tag as just what it is: a string of characters. In general, only humans can derive some meaning from it. But even then, what I mean by 'liberal' or 'mouse' can be interpreted totally different by other people, so they are subjective, and certainly not metadata. Tags are just little labels for a set of resources. They mean something to me, and together they form a kind of personal namespace that holds all the concepts I use to describe or group 'stuff' with. I like to compare this with WikiNames: using a single namespace to identify all contained data. This namespace could contain every entity I know of. (sidenote: I'd really like to couple my namespace, eg. delicious, to such a personal wiki to organize topics, ideas, research, stuff I will forget, etc). Before tags become metadata however, they need to be 'elevated' into types; classes or properties. And then you get into the art of creating schema's, which is very dependent on your goals. An example however of how I think one could do this: I tag something with 'Zita Swoon', and later in my 'personal namespace manager' say that this tag actually is a resource of the type MusicBrainz.Artist. Then, using another namespace, say Dublin Core, I need to tell it that the resource I tagged is something with the metadata DC.Subject 'Zita Swoon'. etc. When you reiterate this exercise with a few tags, you see that there's a lot more involved in creating real metadata than simple tagging. The simplicity of tagging is that I don't need to do this kind of structuring (structures wich might change in maybe a month). At some point, a schema to categorize or bundle tags would be nice though, but I think it's a mistake to try to figure such a thing out in Ephy (not now at least). So I see no difference between tags, Ephy's Topics, keywords, and what else unless they are in some schema, and I don't think Ephy needs such a thing. It's just that 'Topic' would be a bit better to understand to someone not being a web-geek. But they're just strings. One of Ephy's goals is creating a good GUI for this tagging thing, and I hope they also can find a good API to import/export this to couple it with other services. But what do I know, I'm not involved, I just know they make a great browser. ;) My two cents, Berend Ps, does this make sense? -- web, http://dotmpe.com email, berend:dotmpe.com irc, berend/mpe at irc.oftc.net
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