First I would like to show you my appreciation for the quality of the posts, I am really following them and appreciating the links.

For this post I want to say that I am a delicious user and they do have something that goes toward tags aggregation of a loose hiarearchic system.

They are called “bundles” and they allow you to group a couple of tags under the same umbrella. (you can see them used under my account del.iciou.us/mapopescu).

Maybe they build from the buttom up a loose hierarchy by using these bundles. I didn’t studied their new “network” feature but it seems to me they are heading to aggregate tags into something.

Best regards

I’m a delicious user too (to be sincere I’m using more and more Rawsugar lately) and I’m using bundles (or clusters as other systems call them).

Every tagging service today is providing some form of clustering, but clusters are really different from hierarchies.

The broader/narrower terms relationship is different from the associative one and while there a lot of studies (I’ve posted on them) about the automatic hierarchization of clusters, I’m deeply convinced that nothing can replace the semantical value that users can give.

Agglomerative clustering, wordnet baset hierarchization, similarity graphs based hierarchization are wonderful directions that anyway are not providing good enough results.

Anyway the most important point here is that you need a hierarchy, not only (but maybe also) bundles (or related tags).

Cheers,
Emanuele

Thank you for your response. Your latest Etsy example (Facets are easy and love tagging) and this post made me understand better what you are saying.

I guess trying for himself is another way to see better so I’ll try to add facets in a webshop we have in work.

For now, it had only “standard” categories. But after a year or so of use, the client is proposing to add certain “axes” transversal to those standard categories, axes related to the client’s domain.

Can you explain more about what you calle din your latest post “Ranganathan PMEST super categories”? Or provide some links to existing works…

Anyway, thank you for your time,
Marius

His approach was based on the idea of describing a subject through his aspects that he called facets. Facets were somewhat like cartesian coordinates in a multidimensional space and combining in an arbitrary order different coordinates the user can restrict the result space arriving to identify single items.

These facets, Ranganathan thought, could be generally grouped in a few super categories that were:

P personality
M matter
E energy
S space
T time

For each category, a specific faceted classification can identify one or more actual facets. Super categories can be used as a guideline to develop faceted models.

More on this:
http://www.kmconnection.com/DOC100100.htm
http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html
http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-biblio.html
http://www.poorbuthappy.com/fcd/

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