Comments on: Even in defeat, he haunts us… via our folksonomies

By: Stilgherrian · The nightmare of John Howard finally subsides

Stilgherrian · The nightmare of John Howard finally subsides — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:59:47 +0000

[...] months ago, just after the Rudd government came to power, one name dominated this website’s tag cloud. Out of 944 posts, 91 were tagged “john howard”. Finally, that’s [...]

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:33:09 +0000

@Quatrefoil: Yes, controlled vocabularies only work when everyone is properly trained in their use. That is, when information was all produced and distributed by “professionals”. With the production tools in the hands of “everyone”, Everything Changes™.

Google does do synonym matching, but invisibly. You can turn it off if you want. However Google searches the full content, not just the keywords. Will the foreigners know who’s really saying “Sorry”?

“John Howard” is always “John Howard”, unless he’s the other “John Howard”, the actor. Does “opera” refer to a staged musical production, or a certain web browser?

This has always been, and always will be, a hard problem.

By: Quatrefoil

Quatrefoil — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 23:38:17 +0000

The problem with controlled vocabularies is always that what you call a spade I call a shovel. That was solved in the olden days to some extent by ‘see’ references, which meant that when I looked up spade, I’d get a nice little note to ‘see shovel’, or perhaps a reference to a broader or related term, ‘see also entrenching tools’. Interestingly, Google doesn’t do that, so we have to be cluey enough to come up with the synonyms on our own and we seem to be managing quite nicely.

Tagging your own input without recourse to a thesaurus of preferred terms or the ability to use see references means that you’re likely to call the same thing different names some of the time, meaning that you’ll get, say 45 hits for ‘spade’ and 44 hits for ‘shovel’ so they’ll feature lower on the list than ‘John Howard’ who is always ‘John Howard’, unless of course you also use ‘lying rodent’ as a tag.