Not precisely any of the above, although the ad-hoc collections is fairly close to the mark.
A tag is, technically speaking, just a bit of short text with some restrictions on the character set. It automatically defines a page that looks much like any other Thing, which defaults to its most common use -- listing all of the Things that contain that tag. Thus, tags make it easy to navigate around via ad-hoc relationships.
Really, tags are fairly limited compared to some of the other types (especially Text, which is fairly powerful), but it has one crucial characteristic: end users can add values, and thus, add categorizations that weren't baked into the Space by the person who designed it.
The heart of the point is that tags aren't *about* relationships, although they do define some -- they're primarily about categorization, on the theory that categories in the real world are usually better discovered than pre-designed. They can be used in other ways (and based on this conversation, I suspect they will be), but that's the original design intent. That matches the way tags are commonly used around the Web today, albeit with a fair sprinkling of extra power...
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Date: 2012-11-21 07:45 pm (UTC)A tag is, technically speaking, just a bit of short text with some restrictions on the character set. It automatically defines a page that looks much like any other Thing, which defaults to its most common use -- listing all of the Things that contain that tag. Thus, tags make it easy to navigate around via ad-hoc relationships.
Really, tags are fairly limited compared to some of the other types (especially Text, which is fairly powerful), but it has one crucial characteristic: end users can add values, and thus, add categorizations that weren't baked into the Space by the person who designed it.
The heart of the point is that tags aren't *about* relationships, although they do define some -- they're primarily about categorization, on the theory that categories in the real world are usually better discovered than pre-designed. They can be used in other ways (and based on this conversation, I suspect they will be), but that's the original design intent. That matches the way tags are commonly used around the Web today, albeit with a fair sprinkling of extra power...