I see that the tag debate has taken on a new form.
I actually had a dream about this in the sleeper train from Nantes, which is something that happens to me occasionally when I have an interesting problem floating around in my mind.
I think that the main element that needs to be added to a simple tag is the idea of classes, origins, and sets.
For example, I am tagging the Audi rear light that I always refer to in my example. Some of the tags would be "light" "car" "Audi", etc. What I would also like to be able to do would be:
Tag the class. For example, all car parts that are to do with the lighting might be classed under lighting, or functional electronics (As opposed to the other electronics like the ICE, etc.) This class would be a hierarchical search tag. the reason for having it as an appended value, is so that anyone entering a new tag could assign it to a class, and thus ensure a derived, and thus consistent, class level view of multiple objects, without having to add them at the time of data entry. In short, this is a derived tag that assigns lower level tags to a class or classes.
Describe the tag originator. If I look for information in the database, and I want to have a marketing view, I might look for all information that came from John Smith, because he is in marketing, and knows what he is talking about. Similarly, if I wanted a good technical set of tags, then I might filter by Jane Smith's tags. Finally, I might want to flag anything done by Joe Bloggs as being useless crap, and remove it from the results as a distraction or worse. In other words, I want to have some kind of audit and an idea of what level of confidence that I should attach to the results.
Finally, it would be useful to have sets of tags that could be stored for information retrieval, allowing creation of meaningful ad-hoc classes at any time. This would differ from the other derived at entry classes, which would have a more formal audit trail. Sets might be: Lighting, Car, Brand, Price, etc. This would then be used to generate something like a cost of current stock report for the different parts classes.
Just a couple of thoughts on the tagging discussion.
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