Joel Hainley

I was considering ways of generating trees based upon tags and realized that there’s probably two ways to go about generating them. What brought me up short and made me think about writing this down was the following thought :  ”when considering the hierarchical implications of tagging what we’re really doing when we tag something is indicating it’s ancestry”. I’m not sure this is really a new thought but it does lead to some interesting thoughts.

1. We don’t generally consider tagging to be a hierarchical activity, but what would happen if we just tried some different models for constructing hierarchies from tagging. A perusal through set theory might yield some interesting thoughts on this idea.
2. The whole concept of tagging is that we can add an ever increasing number of tags to an item to allow us to describe at some “meta” level what that item means to us. It’s your basic set theory sort of thing, I’ll add an item to this group and this group and this group. From a hierarchical perspective you could say that you are assigning a large number of parents to a particular group, and this seems goofy when you first consider it. This is probably due to connotations that ancestry brings up in our minds. Our DNA is determined solely by our ancestry. Consider a virus though, it can pick DNA up from a bunch of different sources and not just from it’s ancestors. I think I’m digressing.
3. My initial idea of implementing a hierarchy was to simply take the tags and show them as children of an item, and to then do some funny business to show things farther down in the hierarchy with some algorithm to avoid duplicates. When I considered the point in item #1 above I realized that perhaps showing ancestry “downstream” instead of “upstream” ( that is, as branches/leafs of the subtree under a particular item ) might have some interesting implications.

I’m not sure there’s anything of value here, but it’s been interesting thinking about it..more later…maybe.