[Clipart] clipart Digest, Vol 42, Issue 27

[John Olsen]

> From: "Erik Moeller" <erik at wikimedia.org>
>
> On the subject of comments, I am managing the development of
> LiquidThreads, a fairly neat MediaWiki discussion system:
> http://wikixp.org/lqt/index.php/Main_Page
>
> It'll go into production on a couple of non-Wikimedia sites soon, and
> I'll promote it inside Wikimedia as well once I'm comfortable with it.
> It already has a few very neat features, and if I can continue to
> secure funding for it, we'll pursue things like chat and e-mail
> integration.
>
> Categories to me are superior to tags in some ways, and inferior in
> others. They are hierarchically organized, which makes them more
> powerful, and they're standardized (one name per category). But since
> there's no synonymy, that makes it harder to add the right ones.
> There's a bunch of tools in Commons that are trying to help users with
> that, though.
>
> Both tags and categories suck in one important way: they're not
> language-independent. I'd prefer to move towards "concept-tagging";
> I'm working on a fairly exciting project called OmegaWiki.org, which
> is a structured wiki-driven ontology, somewhat similar to Cyc if that
> rings a bell. Concepts have an internal ID, and can be identified by
> any associated synonym or translation. They also have a relational
> network. So my dream is to replace tags and categories with OmegaWiki
> concepts.
>


Would the old tags be able to be used as a basis for building a  
language-independent system?  Any changes to the tagging system  
should be automated change given the amount of labor required to go  
through 10,000+ files using human eyes alone.

John