[Chandler-dev] Topology in tags

[Philippe Bossut]

Hi there,

There's an interesting thread on sharing going on @cosmo-dev. On one of 
the message, Morgen wrote:
- Tags need to be hierarchical, and when examining an item's Tags for 
their ACLs, super-Tags must also be examined.

My gut reaction to hierarchical tag is "no way": hierarchies have plenty 
of usability issues (to create, maintain, modify, etc...). The success 
of the informal "folksonomies" using tags only is a tribute to the idea 
that non-hierarchical tags are easier to manage. *But*, saying that 
there is no spelled out hierarchies between the tags does not mean that 
there is no structure between them. Such a structure will need to be 
deduced through how the tagged items relate to each other. Segmentation 
techniques should be able to infer a local hierarchy of tags even in the 
most tangled set. Once the local hierarchy is deduced (and appropriately 
displayed), one can imagine to turn "off" a whole node ("work" in the 
example given by Bobby).

Of course, this is rather advanced analysis of our soup of data living 
in the repository but I think that some of the things that Xun is 
planning to do would be perfectly applicable here (his unsupervised 
tagging in particular).

Xun, what do you think?

Cheers,
- Philippe