Control your vocabulary!

tags Jul 23, 2008

Tags are everywhere and they are invaluable They are little pieces of text that let you describe your stuff – music files, images, blog posts, browser bookmarks etc – with your descriptions. Some tags live inside the files (like the title, artist ones within a mp3 file, or the exposure, white balance values within a jpg). Others live outside, such as a description or comments of/on that photo when you move it to Picasa, iPhoto or up to the Flickr web site.

But, as I found, you have to be a bit careful.

On this very blog I have a whole section dedicated to bush walking. I added a whole heap of articles, describing assorted walks. I did it in one hit, but (back) dated them to the date of the walk. As the blogging software now supports Tags, I naturally added the tag of bush walks to the posts.

Except I didn’t quite do it that way. In fact, on three different posts, I actually tagged them with:

bush walks
Bushwalks
bush-walks

This was an accident, but the software allowed me to do it. Actually both sets of software allowed it; the client (editor) that I was typing the words into and the server application (WordPress).

And so when later on I looked back at my tag lists I had three new topics/tags. Ouch. I only wanted the one!

Of course the software did exactly as it was told to to, create the 3 tags. In fact it was me who was not using a Controlled Vocabulary.

Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designer of the vocabulary, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, where there is no restriction on the vocabulary.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_vocabulary

In practice I don’t really want to go in – as ‘designer’ – and create a list of tags as a separate exercise. A compromise would be for the editor (client) to simply display a list of tags that I have already use and I can just click on the one(s) I want. Currently I use Microsoft’s Live Writer. It lets me add WordPress keywords, but they are uncontrolled; no list of exiting ones. Hopefully in the future it will be updated to support a user-controller vocabulary.

The beauty of the Live Writer is it runs on the PC. I can also log in to the web site – via a browser – and manually add a new post. In fact that does show me a list of tags (sort of), but editing on the server isn’t as quick and easy as doing it locally on the PC.

One last thing. Google. Want to see how smart they are and why they are worth billions? Do a Google search for