Re: Tags for CPAN modules.

Ken Williams wrote:
> I was about to chime in and say that when an author provides their own
> tags for their work, I think of them as "keywords".  The term "tags" has
> a connotation to me of user-generated labeling.  For instance, in
> academic papers, the author (or perhaps even the conference/journal
> editor) writes the keyword field.

If we assume for a moment that 'keywords' and 'tags' are interchangeable
is it not the case that keywords/tags on academic papers are exclusivel
author generated because there's no interface that allows anyone else to
add tags/keywords? I can't tag your papers even if I wanted to.

> I was quite glad to see a few days ago that cpanforum is adding tags. 
> The obvious problem is that it's just one site, and there may not be
> enough mass in the perl community to support various tag sets at various
> cpan-related sites.  I wonder if there needs to be (at some point down
> the road) some distributed merging of tags from the various
> tagging-enabled cpan metadata sites like search.cpan, cpanforum,
> perldoc, etc.

Having it genuinely distributed (no authoritative source, peer to peer
synching) is probably hard.

Two possible solutions spring to mind:

* design a simple RESTful tagging API and set up an authoritative tag
  server to run it

* have an SVN repo containing USERMETA.yml files per tagged module and
  use SVN to move them around and merge multiple updates.

-- 
Andy Armstrong, Hexten