Re: Of tags and topics

[Peter Harvey <peter a harvey gmail com>]

On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 15:02 +0100, Raphael Slinckx wrote:
> Once the nomenclature is defined, you should probably start implementing
> and/or merging all tagging interfaces (i'm thinking about leaftag's
> nautilus UI, for example) into a consolidated libgnome-tag library,
> providing easy Tagging widgets with simple APIs for developpers, that
> would be immensely useful. As underlined on some leaftag blog comment,
> maybe more than one ui is pertinent for different use cases. Nautilus UI
> tag cloud is one way to display tags, epiphany with a list is another,
> maybe there is some hidden reason why this is like that.

I agree. I think the construction of standardised interfaces should be
the first priority. We can have perhaps two (one for tags, one for
topics, if we're unable to resolve the two concepts) but really should
not have any more than that.

Having a central library for managing tags/topics would be fantastic but
very difficult to implement while being fast I think.

> I like the definitions above, they reflect pretty much what's currently
> used. Maybe there should be a dictionnary of equivalent meanings
> topics = categories | ...
> tags = groups | ...

Thanks, and yes I agree. :) There was a minor error in the definition of
topics, and it was pointed out that not all things are equally
observable by others, but I'll correct that later. I'd like to send a
similar email to a gnome developers or usability list to get more
gnome-wide feedback.

See ya!
Peter.