Re: Of tags and topics

[Ari Torhamo <ari torhamo saunalahti fi>]

su, 2006-03-05 kello 16:40 +1100, Peter Harvey kirjoitti:

> 
> Tag: any label that can be used as metadata for an object.
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> This can include basically anything. Take a photo of a group of friends
> standing on a beach, and you can tag it with the name of each friend in
> the photo, plus "photo", "beach", "sand", "water", "sunshine", etc. If
> you ever want to find some photo of your friend Jack you can just say
> "find all objects with tags 'photo' and 'Jack'". It's great for
> situations where you want a list of objects because you're not after a
> specific object necessarily. Or you want to look at all objects with
> certain properties - not just one.
> 
> 
> Topic: the label you would think of first when trying to find an object.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This definition may sound to have been written backwards, but try it out
> for a bit before criticising. Imagine you are trying to find a specific
> photo again. Not just any photo of a beach, or of your friend Jack, you
> want that specific photo. What labels would you think of first? Perhaps
> "Photos", "Friends", "Beach". You could say that a topic describes the
> main characteristics of an object as if the user was trying to organise
> their objects using the minimum amount of meta-information, but the real
> definition is what I gave first.
> 
> 
> Note that, by what I've described, tags are user-independent and pretty
> haphazard. They're just properties of the object, which should be
> observable by all. Topics are things that are user-dependent, and rely
> on how the user's mind works when looking for something.

One thing that propably will confuse people here is that often when they
deal with there files/objects, the line between what might be a tag and
what might be a topic is very blurred. You may separate these two by
definition, but can you base a user interface on this kind of abstract
thinking? User interfaces should be very easy to grasp for everyone
after all.

You suggest that the names of the people on a photo might be tags. Many
people propably wouldn't intuitively consider names as "a property
observable by all". Often the names of the people on a photo may be the
only thing that just you know (for example two of your friends standing
on Trafalgar Square).

For many objects you just couldn't name just one topic. Often there's
not one main characteristics for an object, but many of them. If you
keep on thinking which one is the main characteristics, you get a
headache. Isn't the current Epiphany bookmark system largely based on
this observation?

Sorry, have to stop - I'm beginning to get a headache :-) It's good that
you are trying to clear these things up. I hope my short reply helped at
all. 

Regards,

Ari