>> On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 21:27 -0800, Chris Messina wrote: >> My first reaction is that categories !== tags
> On 11/27/05, Luke Arno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In fact, tags == categories == labels == etc... Another way of looking at it is that tags are a superset of categories, labels, etc... If something is a category, then it can definitely be represented as a tag. But if something is a tag, it may not necessarily have a category representation. This of course, is totally dependent on the IA of the site/tools in question. One potential benefit of relTags is that they can be decoupled from an actual metadata representation, and just exist as a hyperlink->uri->relationship binding. For example, the following makes sense to me - I don't know if it will to anyone else: <span class="tags"> <em>Filed under:</em> <a href="subject/physics/" rel="tag" class="subject">physics</a> <a href="subject/philosophy/" rel="tag" class="subject">philosophy</a> <a href="topic/information/" rel="tag" class="topic">information</a> </span> The class attributes could well be superfluous, but serve to illustrate the point here, that tags can represent well defined "types" of metadata for a single item. To me, the issue seems to hinge less on the categorical or semantic "differences" between categories and tags - more on the actual tag syntax itself, in terms of whitespace rearing it's ugly head. To (slightly) contradict what I said earlier, it seems that only tag schemes that support space separated, comma delimited phrases, would be directly compatible with the conventional notion of categories. Eg: Categories: Philosophy of Science, Information Theory Not all tagging apps do support this phrase structure, but obviously, any that did would be able to produce metadata where categories<->tags are interchangeable. So categories would be a subset of a subset of the set of all possible tag schemes. (feel free to laugh me off the list for such meta-stupidity - I'm just throwing the idea out there :) >>> On 11/23/05, Brian Suda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> Is this an abuse? because you could always just mark-up the hCard with: >>> <span class="category"><a href="../tag/Conference" >>> rel="tag">Conference</a></span> >>> But this is asserting a relation between this HTML page an the TAG, >>> not the iCalendar file and the tag? In the vCa* example, the use of class="category" certainly seems less ambiguous, but I would think it's ok in some situations to just assume that tags are categories when the structure of the content is well defined but the metadata labelling isn't well defined. I wouldn't think of this as an abuse unless the IA of a site specifically defines a difference between "tags" and "categories", or where the relationship between different items of content to the same set of tags is much more ambiguous. Very few writers or publishers will care about whether a keyword is defined as a category, tag, topic, etc... The actual keyword itself is much more important. Regards, Mark _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
