[Digikam-users] tag structure

jim junk junk_jim at hotmail.com
Wed Jun 23 02:48:10 BST 2010 

Good thread and thanks for the link to Shirky.

I look at your problem through different eyes and so I don't see a real problem.
Lets look at your examples... /city/Munich/English Garden and /city/London/Hyde Park both have a garden or park tag but the tag is the name of the geographic location in which the photo was taken and not a description of what kind of place it is.  There are many, many places that have the name park in them and they're not a park in any sense of the word.  You must have other photos from those cities where you've tagged them with place names as well.  That tag simply gets you to a place in the city.

You can see that I'm heading to a second hierarchy for park and maybe even garden.
I know your concerned about multiple tags but I don't see how you can get around it.  Did you take a picture of a friend in one of your "Parks"; well then you have a tag for them as well.  Maybe you were out with a bunch of your friends; you'll have a tag for each of them.  Took a picture of a bird or some other animal in the park and you have a tag for them as well.  The camera has already given you a bunch of tags.  A few more don't seem like a problem to ME.

One of the reasons I like tags is that it gives you many approaches to accessing your data, photos.  Many of the people on this site use a simple date folder hierarchy to organize their photos and clearly it works for them but such an organizational scheme only gives you access by date unless the photographer can remember what was taken and when it was taken.  Multiple tags gets around that problem.  With tags you can do simple queries and find what you want.  In my workplace if anyone needs a picture they come to me because they know that while I don't have that many photos, 12,000, I can find a photo in minutes.  Need a photo of staff engaged in prescribed fire, I can find 50 of them in minutes and most of the time was in waiting for the program to boot up.

One of the amazing things about tags is that they look and act a lot like folders.  Yes  we're back to that folder hierarchy but that means that we can rename tags or drag and drop them to new hierarchies and the software will change all of the tags in the photos for us.  No opening the images.

For me the moral of the story is just create tags and worry about getting it right later.  I know it's not very elegant  but the space occupied by a few tags is nothing compared to the ten megapixel image itself.

OK tagging is not perfect.  I agree with that but it seems to work.  I should tell you that sometimes I also add a lengthy description of the photo in the comment tag just because the other tags don't seem adequate and yes I can query on that as well.

> Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:10:43 -0400
> To: digikam-users at kde.org
> From: talmage at acm.org
> Subject: Re: [Digikam-users] tag structure
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue Jun 22  9:32 , Benedikt Rudolph <benedikt.rudolph at gmail.com> sent:
> 
> > ...
> >But now I'd like to have a tag "park" which is a super-tag of "English Garden"
> and "Hyde Park". Thus, I'd be in need of a tag structure like /park/English
> Garden and /park/Hyde Park. However, as far as I know I cannot assign both,
> /city/Munich and /park, as super-tags to English Garden.
> >
> >
> >Of course it would be possible to create to distinct tag structures
> /city/Munich/English Garden and /park/English Garden. I would then have to tag
> every picture twice with two distinct "English Garden"-tags. This is quite ugly
> in my opinion for two reasons: First, there is a lot of redundant information
> stored in the image meta-data. Second, the semantics (i.e. the English Garden is
> a park and the English Garden is located in Munich) cannot be expressed and
> changed (!) without touching each single image.
> 
> This is related to the ontology vs. tagging problem that Clay Shirky wrote about
> it http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html.  It's an interesting
> article if you have the time to read it.  He talks about Yahoo's ontology vs.
> del.icio.us's tags.
> 
> This excerpt from the article shows some of the characteristics of the subject
> domains and user communities that are best served by ontologies:
> 
> [Begin excerpt]
> Domain to be Organized
> 
>     * Small corpus
>     * Formal categories
>     * Stable entities
>     * Restricted entities
>     * Clear edges 
> 
> ...
> 
> Participants
> 
>     * Expert catalogers
>     * Authoritative source of judgment
>     * Coordinated users
>     * Expert users 
> [End excerpt]
> 
> 
> 
> This excerpt from the article shows some of the characteristics of the subject
> domains and user communities that are best served by tags:
> 
> [Begin excerpt]
> Domain
> 
>     * Large corpus
>     * No formal categories
>     * Unstable entities
>     * Unrestricted entities
>     * No clear edges 
> 
> Participants
> 
>     * Uncoordinated users
>     * Amateur users
>     * Naive catalogers
>     * No Authority
> [End excerpt]
> 
> 
> You might create several ontologies for your pictures but that can lead to
> duplication as you observed.  Unless you don't mind that duplication, that
> suggests using something less rigid.
> 
> > ...
> >Question 3.) Do you consider it feasible to use a flat tagging structure and
> thereby completely exclude the semantics problem from digiKam?
> 
> You could use some of each.  I have a few disjoint ontologies plus a number of
> singleton tags.
> 
> In my tags, I have a hierarchy for places because a place can't be in two places
> at once.  For instance, I have pictures from a trip to Europe last year tagged
> with "Europe/Germany/Koln" and "Europe/Switzerland/Valais/Breiten ob Morel". This
> lets me select all of the pictures from a continent, country, region, or city. 
> The other tags are less rigid, such as "Train" for pictures of trains,
> "People/Suzanne" for pictures with my then girlfriend in them, and "Vacation" for
> pictures I took on vacation.
> 
> The "People" ontology doesn't work well when someone changes her name. 
> Fortunately, that doesn't happen very often but when it does, I usually leave the
> old tags in place for historical reasons.
> 
> David Talmage
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Digikam-users mailing list
> Digikam-users at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your inbox.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_2
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-users/attachments/20100622/8b397940/attachment.html>

More information about the Digikam-users mailing list