Tags
So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do categorization in ZAT. The new hot thing is tagging, as exemplified by sites like del.icio.us, flickr, and others, but there are definitely problems with existing tagging sites. For example, read Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.
Even so, I think I have decided to not use any categories in ZAT, and use tags instead, but make some pretty major changes to existing tagging systems. First of all, I am going to use ratags (ratings tags) exclusively, instead of plain simple tags. So for each tag, there will be a rating associated with it.
For example, let’s say there is a place we want to enter into ZAT that is both a hotel and a restaurant. You would give it two tags, “restaurant” and “lodging”. That place might be a great restaurant, but a mediocre hotel, and the ratings would (hopefully) reflect that.
You can add other tags to any place, to support special interests. For example, there could be a tag for vegetarian restaurants.
Second, I am not going to just let people type in any old tag they want. Tags have to be explicitly created. By default, I would have tags like “restaurant” “lodging” “camping” and “top-sight”. Users can create their own tags, too. When a tag is created, you also can give it a number of related names. For example, “food” might be a related term for “restaurant”. I’m going to use some AJAX auto-completion with tags, so if you are submitting a restaurant to ZAT and you start to type in a tag of “food” it will provide an auto-completion value of “restaurant”. I hope this will help people use consistent tags.
We’ll see how this works out.
–wm
[added 28 sept] so far working out very well!