Life is grand

In a previous post I mentioned ActionTags. Along those lines I’d like to see tagging systems support “key/value pairs.” This is a familiar concept to any programmer. Basically you have a table in your database that can store an ad-hoc set of data. Anything that doesn’t fit into your other tables or is not worth creating a distinct model for. e.g. application settings. You identify the value with a key and that can be easily retrieved.

JSON is a key/value pair system really (except that values can be structures themselves.)

When it comes to tagging key/value pairs would work well and provide some distinct meaning to tags. You could have fruit:orange with the key being fruit and the value being orange in that case. colour:orange is then distinct from fruit:orange.

I was thinking of this because I am doing some “open CMS” research at work and wanted to save my Blinklist links into a collection related to the research. At first I thought of providing a unique tag for this, e.g. researchproj001 or something convoluted like that. It struck me though that simply doing collection:Project Name works well. Blinklist and I assume other systems allow the colon and so support this already. But they need a bit more work to make it completely usable. I don’t want to loose the tag inside the value of the key/value pair. e.g. if I tagged a link as collection:Bubble Project I wouldn’t be able to show a list of links with that tag “Bubble Project.” I’d have to use the whole k/v of collection:Bubble Project as Blinklist treats it as one tag.

So, some sort of key/value pair support in tagging systems, please.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 8:07 pm and is filed under ActionTags, Value, action tags, key, key/value pairs, lixb, pair, tagging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.