[Debtags-devel] More examples of facets/tagging/categories

[Enrico Zini]

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On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 04:13:59AM -0700, Erich Schubert wrote:

> Two links:
> http://www.kaskaras.net/vazaar/screenshots.php
> interesting looking information manager for gnome

Sigh... hierarchical and non-faceted.  And it seems to follow the idea
that everything could be found by selecting one and only one tag from a
very complex hierarchy :(

In the Psycology of Everyday Things, Norman made a nice rule on the
difficulty of choice making: either the tree of possibility is deep and
narrow, or it's wide and shallow.  A deep tree means having to make
choices many times to complete a task, while a wide tree means having to
make difficult choices.  If difficult choices have to be taken, that
shouldn't repeat too much; if lots of choices have to be taken, they
should not be that difficult.

debtags-edit narrowing down the results is an attempt of making the
tree of choices become narrower and shallower.


BTW, I've starting make some experiment with computing implications
between facets.  The idea is taking a collection, replacing "facet::tag"
with only "facet" and computing implications on that.
For example, uitoolkit looks like it should probably imply interface.
Computing the existing implications, this is what I get:

  filetransfer: protocol
  hwtech: hardware

This generates 2 nice ideas:

 1) Looking for packages with uitoolkit::* and not any of interface::*
    is now a good way of spotting missing tags.

 2) If a facet implies another, then it does not need to be displayed in
    a toplevel facet selection.


> http://www.gnomefiles.org/
> we should investigate their categories as an example for the
> tech/use/foo facets.
> basically, each category here should have a match (which may be
> multiple tags in combination) in debtags.

I like this a bit more.  There's data we could use, at least in "Audio
tools", "Development", "Games" and more, probably much less so in
"Productivity" or "Utilities".

It's not really faceted, though, as those categories don't really
express different properties of the applications.  But still, their
ontologies are interesting, and they sound very valuable at least to
fill gap in our vocabulary.

Useful site, by the way.


Ciao,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>

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