Re: Of tags and topics

[Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>]

On Mon, 2006-03-06 at 00:49 +0200, Ari Torhamo wrote:
> I'm sorry if you have already said this and I missed it, but I suppose a
> topic could be same as a tag (or one of the tags)?

Sometimes a topic would be a tag, and vice-versa. Therein lies the
problem. Taking my favourite photo of my imaginary friend Jan smiling:

      * "Favourite" is not a tag, it's a topic, because it's how I'd
        find the object again (where's my Favourite photo of Jan?)
      * "Smiling" is a tag, not a topic. unless I have a lot of photos
        of Jan and really needed to separate them further. I use it as a
        tag so I can find photos (note the plural!) of people smiling.
      * "Jan" is probably a topic *and* a tag, as it's factual about the
        photo and is how I'd located it again.

> Would you have two interfaces for navigating (or have them combined
> somehow)? I was just thinking today while I was searching for a
> bookmark/topic I knew I had somewere, that it would be good if one was
> able to use both the hierarchial structure and the tags/keywords. The
> idea came propably from one of your posts. Do you have a tree structure
> in mind when you talk about topics here. By definition, if there's a
> label that clearly comes to your mind first when you think of an object,
> then there's no reason not to put it in a tree structure, as the main
> problem with tree structures is that some objects could be placed into
> two or more branches. Perhaps you could have a tree structure for some
> of the objects and have tags for them all.

Have a look at http://peter.a.harvey.googlepages.com/epiphany and look
at the way we build the menu there. :) We don't place topics or
bookmarks in a hierarchical structure, but we do construct a hierarchy
*from* them. And bookmarks can exist on multiple branches.

I do imagine that we'd need separate interfaces. But we need to let the
user know exactly how these things are different. Perhaps calling them
"Topics" or "User Topics" and then having "Global Tags". Because the
idea of 'tags' would be that it's common to everyone.

Regards,
Peter.