[uf-discuss] hCa* CATEGORIES as TAGS

[Chris Messina]

My first reaction is that categories !== tags. At least in
conventional usage, categories seem to imply an interface-based
correlation whereas tags are applied to semantically identify an
object.

For example, I might use the category "Smells like fish" on my blog
for peculiar news stories yet I'll tag the posts with "news",
"government" and "george bush". (Aren't you glad I didn't use an hCard
example?)

In that case, if you were to try to suggest that the category usage is
parallel with the tag use, I might take umbrage. Quite obviously,
"Smells like fish" isn't a semantic way to describe the content.

OTOH, dealing with contacts might be different. It seems to answer
this somewhat more scientifically, you might conduct a brief survey
and find out if blogging practices carry over to contact management
(my guess is that it will vary -- i.e. mailing lists are another kind
of categorization).

So ultimately, I think you ought be careful about the overlap between
tags and categories, because they're not the same thing and I would
doubt are meant to be used interchangeably.

My somewhat-uninformed two cents.

Chris

On 11/22/05, Brian Suda <brian.suda at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have recently been working on an internal search spider.
> Specifically to index pages with microformat content and to aggrigate
> them. (nothing akin to the Google Base).
>
> My question is this: Can we consider the property CATEGORIES inside a
> vCard and/or iCalendar file, equivalent to a rel="tag"? or should we?
>
> My spider is looking for pages with rel="tag" so that it can index
> them into a TAGS database table. Now when it comes across the X2V
> link, the response is a flat vCard. That data in saved and indexed,
> but knows nothing of the original encoded HTML. I have also been
> parsing the vCard, so were normally an HTML file <title> element is
> used, the vCard FN is its replacement. Is it wrong then to parse the
> CATEGORIES properties and insert those values into the TAGS table.
>
> The benefit is when you get a breakdown by TAG, that flat vCard, iCal
> is included. So if i want to see all objects categorized as
> "Conference" i will see all the blog posts AND the iCalendars to
> subscribe too.
>
> Is this an abuse? because you could always just mark-up the hCard with:
> <span class="category"><a href="../tag/Conference"
> rel="tag">Conference</a></span>
> But this is asserting a relation between this HTML page an the TAG,
> not the iCalendar file and the tag?
>
> any thoughts?
> -brian
>
> --
> brian suda
> http://suda.co.uk
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>