Article Tags

Article Tags

[Article Img]

Purpose

This is a proposal for the use of tags (rather than a hierarchical containment tree) to classify documents. Under this proposal, the collection of documents are simply a linked graph, and we can have many Containment orders by simply maintaining index pages.

Formally speaking, a Containment is simply a partial spanning trees defined by index pages, which is how we'd have done it anyway. The thrust here is that Containments are too restrictive, since an article may fit, for example, into both the "Climber" and "Ribbon" subsystems (non exclusivity) and that in different scenarios, different orders of containment makes sense (e.g. subsystem first, or status, etc.)

Using tags eliminates both these problems.

Presentation

The tags, along with other information such as title, cover image, author, date (and perhaps abstract) are displayed in an Infobox on the top right. (The abstract may best be presented in its own box, below it). We can potentially use a page formatting template to make baseline tags actually appear different, though this should be used sparsely, maybe only for the status tag.

Protected Tags

Most tags are passed to the system through an infobox instantiation box, though some are controlled by the infobox system. A good example are status tags (Baseline/Peer Reviewed/..) since we do not want the author controlling them. This means the Infobox has access to the list of article names that are "Baseline", and the template for the infobox is protected.

Navigation

Once articles are tagged, several auto navigation tools become trivial

Automatic Index Pages

As part of the navigation system, tags should be associated with auto-generated index pages.

Filter

Perhaps the strongest tool, a filter takes a subset of tag values and returns a list of relevant articles. (perhaps with abstracts, if the list is short enough)

For example, the user interaction might look like this:

• "There are 2414 articles currently in the DB"
• select tags: Peer Reviewed, Ribbon, Deployment
• "there are 132 articles that match these tags"
• select date
• select author
• "there are 4 articles that match your query, listed below…"