Tips about humor and creativity

Multi-word tags are useful to decrease the number of related bookmarks, so if I search using a single word I should find also multi-word tags. For the same reason if I search using a multi-word tag I should get only results having all the words.
I see multi-word tags as the intersection of the collections represented by the words, whilst multiple tags are unions of the words.
Why is a tag a collection? A Tag represents the main feature of an object for a given perspective discarding less relevant ones. In other words, tags are more abstract of the tagged object hence the tagged object is one of many examples of the collection represented by the tag. In fact, tags are used to group bookmarks.

Hum, is this all there is? No, actually a multi-word tag can be seen as a collective of single words. Collectives can also have emergent properties which are not found in their constituent elements (see emergence in Wikipedia). The multi-word tag, then, is also useful to refer to the emergent properties of their constituent words. This is in accordance with the search criterion stated above.

From a perspective more prone to consider collectives, the emergent properties can be reflected onto the constituent elements but are less relevant. Again, the search criterion for multi-word tags is safe.

As for plural forms, they should be treated as synonyms of singular forms because they are the intersection of the word “collection” and the singular form, but plural forms could also have emergent properties which reflect strongly onto the singular form. Even in this case, the search criterion is safe.

Conversely, a collection of single-word tags can be seen as a collective. How do we get out of this conundrum?

All in all, we can think that the reason for introducing multi-word tags is to decrease the degree of separation between single-word tags (for example to speak about the intersection of the words, or about the emergent properties of the resulting collective)

Categories and subcategories are another tricky subject. They are useful to split huge lists of bookmarks into different projects, hobbies, topics, etc. Categories sometimes simplify the retrieval of the relevant bookmarks and come in handy to see all and only the bookmarks related to specific projects, hobbies, topics, etc.
Since categories define their bookmarks, they should be added to every tag (multi or single-worded) to form multi-tags which include the category and subcategories as words.

Sadly most social bookmarking sites do not stress enough the importance of consistency in tagging. As a result users use dashes, underscores, no spaces etc. decreasing the quality of the service.

© alexlondra

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