RE: Encoding tags in DRS

Hi Phil,

I think in general it is a good idea to provide more means of describing
resources, thereby increasing the flexibility to do so.

However, as much as a tag is a free form entity, aren't the descriptors
the same?
In other words, what do we gain?
Does it help to basically list an "example" or does that artificially
limit the interpretation of the descriptors?

Not being really familiar with tags beyond their existance I looked it
up on Wikipedia.
As for white spaces being used, I found this on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29


Syntax

Some tagging systems provide a single text box to enter textual tags. To
be able to tokenize the string, a separator must be used. A popular
separator is the space character although a comma is preferable as it
enables the use of phrases or multiple words to describe a concept. To
enable the use of separators in the tags, a system may allow for
higher-level separators (such as quotation marks) or escape characters.
Systems can avoid the use of separators by allowing only one tag to be
added to each input widget at a time, although this makes adding
multiple tags inefficient.

Another syntax for use within HTML is to use the attribute rel="tag" to
indicate that the linked-to page acts as a tag for the current context.
For example, to tag this page with 'folksonomy' you would add <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/folksonomy" rel="tag">folksonomy</a>.

More detail is available in the rel tag specification.


Looking at the seemingly "unstable" nature of tags and the fact that
rel="tag" is, at least on microformats.org a draft from 2005 I am not
sure if this a good idea.

Incidentally, we use the word "tag" a lot in our documents where we
actually mean "element".  Do we care?



-- Kai







Please make note of my new email address:
k.scheppe@telekom.de
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Phil Archer [mailto:parcher@icra.org] 
> Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 4:52 PM
> To: Public POWDER
> Subject: Encoding tags in DRS
> 
> 
> One of our use cases [1] calls for DRs to support free text 
> tags and for it to be possible to associate such tags with a 
> a semantic definition. For example, I might want to associate 
> my tag 'red' with something more prescriptive like 'ff0000'. 
> The use case (which comes from my.opera) talks about the 
> Dahut and cryptozoology.
> 
> I've been thinking about how we might do this in POWDER ('cos 
> the present text has all the problems we're just overcoming 
> with our two-part system).
> 
> OK, how's this:
> 
> <POWDER xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/05/powder#"
>          xmlns:ex="http://example.org/vocab#">
> 
>    <attribution>
>      <maker>http://authority.example.org/foaf.rdf#me</maker>
>      <issued>2007-12-14</issued>
>    </attribution>
> 
>    <DR>
>      <URISet>
>        <includeHosts>example.org</includeHosts>
>      </URISet>
> 
>      <Descriptors>
>        <ex:color>red</ex:color>
>        <ex:shape>square</ex:shape>
>        <displayText>Everything on example.org is red and 
> square</displayText>
>        <displayIcon>http://example.org/icon.png</displayIcon>
>      </Descriptors>
> 
>      <Tags mapsTo="http://ui.example.com#panicButton">red 
> square</Tags>
> 
>    </DR>
> 
> </POWDER>
> 
> Here our DR contains the URISet and _two_descriptive units. 
> My proposal is that a DR must contain at least one of these. 
> The Descriptor set is the familiar one, but there's now a 
> Tags element that contains a white space separated list of 
> tags. The mapsTo attribute (optional) might then link to the 
> Descriptors block in another POWDER doc or any other bit of 
> RDF that had a semantically-defined definition. So the 
> semantics here are "when I say red and square I mean the same 
> as ui.example.com mean by their term 'panicButton'.
> 
> I guess we could make the tags an element within the 
> Descriptors but this doesn't feel right. A tag is a free-form 
> thing, Descriptions are much more tightly constrained and I 
> fear we might imply that ex:color='red' and ex:shape='square' 
> both meant the same as panicButton
> - they don't.
> 
> I did toy with saying that a DR can only have Tags or 
> Descriptors but this is pointless since you can create 2 DRs 
> with the same URISet in the same POWDER doc to archive what's 
> written above.
> 
> Incidentally, I believe I'm right in saying that tagging 
> systems in general do not allow white space within tags, i.e. 
> Eiffel Tower is 2 tags. If this is wrong and we should 
> support tags with white space we can do that too but we'd end up with
> 
> <TagSet mapsTo="http://ui.example.com#panicButton">
>    <tag>red</tag>
>    <tag>square</tag>
> </TagSet>
> 
> Any comments?
> 
> 
> Phil.
> 
> [1]
> 
> --
> Phil Archer
> Chief Technical Officer,
> Family Online Safety Institute
> w. http://www.fosi.org/people/philarcher/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Monday, 3 March 2008 08:19:38 UTC