[Sigia-l] tagging versus taxonomy

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

Hi,

Answering your questions - I am talking about fundamental teoretical
differences between those two models of classifying thigs and their
consequences in the cognitive process of both classifying and finding
something previously classified.  With tags you can specify compound
terms like 'tag1 and tag2 and tag3' while with taxonomy, as I
understand it, you would need a separate name for each of those terms.
 In other words  taxonomy is a language where you need a word for
everything while tags are words plus some rules about how to combine
them.

I don't remember the exact number of such terms - but a simple
inductive proof that there are more than 2^n might go like this:
1. let's assume the inductive hypothesis for n
2. when we add one more term we can combine it with each of the
previous terms so we have more than 2^n the previous terms plus the
more than 2^n new terms => more than 2^(n+1) terms in total q.e.d

What I would like to stress here is that the difference in
descriptivness is expotential - that's huge.

--
Zbyszek

On 10/16/06, Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/16/06, Zbigniew Lukasiak <zzbbyy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Tagging is not only about using lonly tags, but also about using them
> > in conjunction - that is, it defines a simple language for defining
> > sets of objects and using it with n tags you can describe no less than
> > 2^n (2 to the power of n) different properties.
>
> Why?
>
> > Since human brain can remember only a finite set of categories this is
> > not a useless thing.
>
> It really is more about establishing patterns over time, and I think
> the further away from basic category you get, the harder the pattern
> is to establish.
>
> > Is that a new angle or I am reinventing the weel with this argument?
>
> Not sure what it is, but my 5cents in terms of the difficulties
> between taxonomies (and beware; people use many different definitions)
> and tagging (again; do you mean folksonomies, tagsonomies, or
> something even less compound?) is really dependant on a) who's
> tagging, and b) what the aim of it is. One can use these tools for
> many different things, and the combination of a and b together with
> the goals of the excercise is somewhat of a hard task to get right.
>
>
> regards,
>
> Alex
> --
> "Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
>                                                          - Frank Herbert
> __ http://shelter.nu/ __________________________________________________
>


-- 
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/