Re: [OSCOM] factes, tags

Paola,

> We  just finished parsing the content, thru an autotagging system and 
> ended up with a massive, hiroshima type tag cloud explosion.

Yup. I can picture that easily. Gosh.

> I see that you are doing some work in this area
> http://www.facetag.org/

> Please let me and the community have your suggestions as to what are the 
> options as we stand. Seek to implement this week :-)

That tag clouds have ux and usability limits and that we have to look to 
alternatives / better ways to empower the users is now common knowledge. 
There is a number of papers on this very subject, a lot of researching 
and a number of web applications that are already trying out remedies 
(say, RawSugar).

The problem with facets + Drupal, as far as I've investigated some 
months ago, is that you can actually use the Taxonomy module as your 
skeleton key (*) for most of the low-level work, but you currently lack 
the ability to show faceted or clustered tag in a sensible and useful 
way. Obviously, you cannot build a proper zooming interface as seen on 
facetmap.com or in FaceTag either (**), and that is quite a issue in 
terms of data to juggle between HTTP calls (you have to keep track of 
where you are all of the time).

Generally speaking, the road to go for tag-laden web sites is faceting 
or anyway 'splitting up tags in different meaningful categories', since 
facets have a very precise scientific meaning as far as library sciences 
are concerned, but right now, I do not think there is any out-of-the-box 
solution: you could probably use a wise combination of vocabularies and 
taxonomy modules to cluster tags, but I do not think this can be an 
effective solution in the long run.

Furthermore, the issue is vast and I do not know anything specific about 
your project, and that makes it quite hard for me to actually come out 
with anything significative. Is that tagging 'closed' (let's say like in 
a controlled vocabulary) or is it open to contributions (be it social or 
editorial) and growing? That would make a difference in the way you can 
anticipate (or can't) some of the outcomes. Why did you resort to 
'tagging' as opposed to traditional IA in the first place?

As a sidenote, we showed a working prototype of the FaceTag engine at 
EuroIA some weeks ago, and I had a chance to chat with Gunnar Langemark 
(http://drupal.org/user/1075) about the fact that when I started to code 
the thing I actually considered to code it as a Drupal module. I 
ultimately let it go because that required a thorough comprehension of 
Drupal's innards I didn't have time to build at the time. I started 
toying around again with the idea after talking to Gunnar, so I'm far 
from having anything even remotely intelligible or shareable, but I 
thought then and think now that this could be a very interesting path to 
follow (and I'm also confident that Drupal would probably make some of 
the low-level gigs a breeze to code).

If you think that getting into a more detailed view of FaceTag's own 
faceting engine would help or that you could benefit from a IA 
brainstorming on these issues or even actual code, please let me know. I 
think anyway that an IRC / Skype meeting would be more effective, then.

Keep me posted,

--

Andrea Resmini
vector-qiE7/[email protected]


(*) I wrote a short sketch about that here: 
http://www.resmini.net/columns/tabspace/implementing_facets_in_drupal

(**) I included a couple of screenshots in a private message to Paola, 
not to clog the ML. Screenshots and slides from EuroIA and everything 
should go online at www.facetag.org as soon as we have some time to 
clean things up. Anybody interested, just drop me a line.