Transitioning Categories to Tags

Published: 9 March 2011
( Page 1 2 3 )

Concepts


To both ease the transition, and make tags more powerful, we are including a few concepts into our implementation:

New 'Geographical Context' list


We are introducing a new category list to replace the current 8,000 strong category dropdown (and/or auto-complete textbox), you may find this referred to as 'Top level Category' - a name used during development to distinguish it. The new list is much shorter containing only around 45 items, so is both quicker and more convenient to select. It is also fixed, requiring work from the site developers to change the list (no more 'Other').

During image submission will still need to select from this short listExternal link, but an important bonus of this, it will help refine the tag suggestions making the tagging process quicker (should you wish to tag the image - a practice certainly encouraged).

The PGC is stored as a tag, meaning can actually add several to an image, it makes the tag list useful both for categorization and tagging.

Category will live on as Tag(s)


The category currently assigned to each existing image will automatically become a tag. This means that all existing images will have at least one tag, but also importantly the information represented by that category is not lost.

Mapping the current category list to 'Geographical Context'


Again to help the transition, and to make the tags attached to the back-catalogue of images more useful, we are seeking to assign as many as possible of the current list to the new 'Geographical Context'.

[read more: Assigning the current Categories to 'Geographical Context' ProjectExternal link ]

Once we have a good mapping, the new category will be automatically added to the images.

This will mean that you can browse the majority of the Geograph archive via the new Categorization system right away.

(Because not all old categories will not fit into a new one, some images won't have a new category right away. We will be exploring ways to address this once the current project is over.)

Creative Commons Licence [Some Rights Reserved]   Text © Copyright March 2011, Barry Hunter; licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence.
With contributions by Geographer and Penny Mayes. (details)

( Page 1 2 3 )
You are not logged in login | register