[Sigia-l] Eliminating categories in favour of tagging

[Listera]

Seth Earley:

> Because terns can be applied without consistent interpretation, results will
> have high levels of recall but poor precision.

There are many applications (heck, they might be in the majority by far)
where precision is secondary to scalability and other benefits of tagging by
users. There's another layer of abstraction/relation that can be placed on
top of vocabularies, controlled or otherwise: variations of the PageRank
notion. That is, the inter-relationships among tags and their usage patterns
in a feedback loop that generates additional info/meaning/insight that tags
alone cannot provide. After all, Google achieved a degree of "precision" in
search previously unheard of until PageRank without the benefit of every
site or page being tagged. While this is not the same kind of precision
offered by professional taxonomy/controlled vocabularies, it nevertheless
has become very successful. Next step is to combine the two approaches in
various degrees: enter GoogleBase and Microsoft Fremont.

----
Ziya

"Innovate as a last resort."