The whole point of folksonomy is that users make up their own tags.
Quite so. But, I'm more concerned with duplicate data (a technical implementation) and how it should, or shouldn't, affect "users making up their own tags" (an, arguably, UI implementation). If one user creates "cat" and another user creates "cat", aren't they the same thing? Why should there be two unique tags (and thus tids, RSS feeds, etc.)? Is this going to make equivalency code more difficult? If there are two different vocabs, and one user says that "feline" is a "synonym" of "cat", is that information that we want to throw away for every other user, simply because they didn't care or know to create the same (arguably correct in this innocent example) association? And, if not, why should I need to do a join on the user table? Does /no one else/ want any sort of "similar keywords" UI, per the UI at http://disobey.com/d/2005/similar_keywords.jpg? If yes, then would similar keywords be across all folksonomy vocabs, or just an individual user? If there are 1000 users and each user creates 100 terms in their vocab, with a perfect match of (even) 10%, aren't we wasting a lot of resources storing those duplicates? (Note: I suck at math. I have no clue if that calculation makes some sort of scary figure. But, uh, I meant it to <g>).
Otherwise, you have one central vocab like today. At first blush, it seems you want taxonomy on the fly where users add terms to the central
Correct, but an additional table (whether it be new or profile.module) would associate uids to tids. I'm having a tough time comprehending or believing that: * technorati is creating $copies amount of terms called "funny", as opposed to just storing one instance of it and uid joining. * that my innocent gamegrene site, with two controlled vocabs, is suddenly going to blossom into 900+ vocabs that I have absolutely no control over, nor can ever delete. * that the NHPR site, with 7000 unique terms, is going to store at least 10 times that many (I'd say there are about 80 users/ reporters/ submitters, all who use about 3-10 tags per entry) in your current proposal/design. -- Morbus Iff ( you are nothing without your robot car, NOTHING! ) Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/ Spidering Hacks: http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005776/disobeycom icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus