Dave Johnson

I found it quite interesting some months ago when somebody posted a comment on one of my photos in Flickr asking why I had tagged it with the word “photovoltaic”. It appears that I have since taken down that photo but just take a look at this one and most people can likely see the confusion

I am sorry but how can we expect a couple of words describe everything about some picture to someone who doesn’t know me or know anything about the photo? At best they could say something like

“this photo is tagged with barcelona, 2005 and photovoltaic. if I Google those I find the first result is a photovoltaic conference in Barcelona in 2005 so he was probably there. but what the hell do cargo containers have to do with anything”

But when I look at that photo I think

“oh yeah that was at the photovoltaic conference in Barcelona in 2005 where I gave my talk on photon recycling and we were living in London and Ian and Annabelle came from Vancouver to visit and I felt really horrible about all those CO2 emissions from their airplane and we went to that castle in Barcelona where there was a good view of the harbour and I thought that those shipping crates looked kind of cool so I snapped this photo - I wonder what relationship this photo has with the next and previous one other than time and group? oh shit did I leave the stove on? what are the implications of cargo containers on AJAX in Spain? “

Of course this sort of thing even happens when we are talking or reading other people’s writing. Just the other day, and what actually spurred me to write this post, I posted a response to an AJAX question in a group on Google and for some reason a really picky guy replied to my answer complaining about my saying “data transport encoding”. He suggested that I meant to say “data transport formatting” because encoding _really_ means ASCII, UTF-16 etc. While dictionary.com says that encoding is “To format (electronic data) according to a standard format” - ok so it’s just data formatting - like he said. My point here is that if I said “data encoding” and that is all, then you could think that I meant DVD encoding or Huffman coding or ASCII encoding or XML encoding. Only when you take into account the _entire_ context of a statement can you ascertain the _real_ meaning. You have to take into account that I was just reading about phase modulation for wireless communication and so used the word encoding or maybe I had a bad lunch or maybe I was actually thinking a completely different word but just wrote that one instead. Looking at the problem with writing is obviously a bit far fetched but no less interesting to thing about. Incidentally the poster also objected to my use of the term “array” when using it to refer to a group of objects - he insisted it was a data-structure; I can certainly see his concern if he has just had his head in some code for a day.

And my point is what? My point is tags, even writing, is just not good enough. There is too much context to provide to give the tags their proper meaning. I may use the word “photovoltaic” to refer to the fact that a picture was taken while I was in a city attending a photovoltaic conference but I may also use it to describe an actual picture of a PV panel all at the same time.

Tags need tags.

What do other people think?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Web2.0, Tagging, Semantic Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.