Article Tags

Title: Article Tags
[Article Img]	Author: Ben Shelef Written: July 6, 2008 Modified: July 6, 2008 This article is NOT peer reviewed Discipline(s): Wiki, Engineering This page is a tutorial
This is a proposal for the use of tags as the main document classification mechanism

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.

Implementation and Presentation

The simplest "in-band" mechanism to implement tags is based on an Infobox-like templates.

The tags, along with other information such as title, cover image, author, date (and perhaps an article abstract) are displayed in an Infobox on the top right.

We can potentially use page formatting templates to make baseline tags actually appear different, though this should be used sparsely, maybe only for the status tag.

Protected (Administration) 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…"

Next Steps

• First thing's first, the system has to be tried out statically on the first 100 articles or so, to see that it works out.

• Write the infobox, if that's indeed the mechanism we use.

• Need to work out the mechanisms for the filter and auto-index pages.

List of Tags

The tags below are grouped to "somewhat exclusive" groups - for example, usually an article is exactly one of engineering/legal/humor/art ... but I can think of exceptions...

The only tags that I think should be protected are the 'status' tags.

STATUS

• Baseline Has been accepted into the baseline group of articles
• Peer Reviewed Has been peer reviewed (should have comments by the reviewers and revision history)
• Not Reviewed New stuff
• Contentious Has been deemed contentious yet acceptable

CONTENT

• Has 3D
• Has calculator
• Has media

DISCIPLINE

• Engineering An engineering/science article
• Politics A political article
• Economics
• Legal
• Environmental Article has to do with doom and gloom
• History
• SciFi Articles with a plot!
• Art
• Competitions
• Humor

CONTEXT

• Index Article is mostly pointers to other articles
• Tutorial Article is introductory text
• FAQ Article is a frequently asked question

PLANET

• Earth Article is specific to a terrestrial Elevator
• Mars Article is specific to a Martian Elevator
• Moon Article is specific to a Lunar Elevator
• Asteroid Article is specific to an Elevator on an asteroid

FIELD

• Mechanical
• Electrical
• Chemical
• Thermal
• Orbital Mechanics
• Control
• CNT technology
• PV technology

SUBSYSTEM

• Ribbon Article pertains to the ribbon design
• Climber Article pertains to the climber design
• Power Beaming Article pertains to the power beaming system
• Anchor Article pertains to the anchor station
• Architecture Article addresses global architecture issues

Loose Tags

• Deployment Article is relevant to the deployment phase
• Operations Article is relevant to steady state operation

• Applications Article is about applications enabled by Space Elevator
• Tourism
• Manufacturing zero-g manufacturing processes
• SBSP Space Based Solar Power