Mises Tagging Overview

HeroicLife — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 15:42:00 GMT

The framework used to tag pages on Mises.org is a tagging library I developed to tag any kind of content on Mises.org. The tag library references GUID's assigned to all objects in the Mises.org databases. It tracks users by username or IP address as well as the date that each tag was added. It includes spam/badword filtering and has some simple tag rewriting to automatically correct misspelled words and incomplete names. For a simple tag example, see business cycle.

Update: Mises Tagging is now an open source project! See the project page for details.

Architecture overview:

Datbase layer:

The database schema gives a good indication of the data-access layer:

Stored procedures:

UI Layer:

The interface is organized into self-contained user controls.

TagCloud.ascx - a tag cloud for the given document
Example: http://www.mises.org/resources/3250 (Sroll down)
EditTags.ascx - an editable list of tagged documents and a user-specific tag cloud.
Example: http://www.mises.org/mymises/ (You'll have to register at Mises.com tag some documents first.)
TaggingStats.ascx - global tagging statistics
Example: http://www.mises.org/clouds.aspx#stats

Management:

DocumentTags.ascx - an editable list of tags for a particular document
Tags.aspx: delete tags, delete all tags by a particular user and search/replace tags

The MisesBot:

You might have noticed that 99% of all tags are entered by the MisesBot. The bot is an application that uses the meta tags collected by the MetaParser (detailed in a future post) as well as other available metadata to add tags to document.

Thanks to:

Cloud Control for ASP.Net - displays a list of hyperlinks in varying styles depending on a weight.
Toxi - the inspiration for the tag schema
Freetag, an Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications - the inspiration for the business logic layer
Community Server - Inspired the tag browser interface and provided the banned words list.

To do:

Did you notice the TagAuthority field in the tag schema? A future version of the MisesBot will automatically determine the "authoritative" document for each tag.
Automatically mark up content. If we know the authoritative document for a tag, we can automatically link to it when that tag appears in the document text.
Improving the "related tags" algorithm. I could use some help with this:

Here is the query to get related tags. The problem is that it currently ranks tags according to their total popularity, not their "related-ness."

CREATE
PROCEDURE [dbo].[TagGetRelatedTags]        
        @Tag VARCHAR(70)
AS
BEGIN   
        DECLARE
                @TagId int
                SET @TagId =
                        (SELECT TagId FROM Tag WHERE Tag = @Tag)
                        SELECT  TOP 30 Tag.Tag,
                                COUNT(TagMap.TagId) AS 'Count'
                        FROM    TagMap
                        INNER JOIN Tag
                        ON      TagMap.TagId    = Tag.TagId
                        WHERE   [TagMap].TagId <> @TagId
                            AND (TagMap.TagId  IN
                                (SELECT DISTINCT TagId
                                FROM    TagMap
                                WHERE (ObjectId IN
                                        (SELECT ObjectId FROM TagMap WHERE (TagId = @TagId)))
                                )
                                )
                        GROUP BY TagMap.TagId,
                                Tag.Tag
                        ORDER BY 'Count' DESC
                END

How I converted Mises.org to Web 2.0 (Part 1)

HeroicLife — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:39:00 GMT

During the period of late August - mid September 2007, I redesigned the architecture of Mises.org from the ground up from a largely-static "web 1.0" era site to a future-oriented database and user driven "web 2.0 enabled" site. In the next few posts, I will present a somewhat-technical overview of my changes and share the tools and applications which I created. I hope that this will help the users and contributors of Mises.org as well as anyone contemplating a similar conversion.

Part one: Overview

First, let's look at a high-level overview of my goals, some implementation challenges, and how I resolved them:

Building an online community

Goal: create an online community - including forums, blogs, and live chat

Challenge: Distinguish between approved and professional content and user-contributed content

Solution:

Create the community site on a new mises.com domain to complement the existing mises.org site.
By branding the two sites differently, we make it clear which site represents "official" content and which is created by users.
Community Server provides blogging and forums, phpFreeChat provides chat functionality.

Goal: create a user profile-management system to tie together the mises.org and mises.com sites.

Challenge: A single integrated authentication system is necessary to tie together the new content-management system behind mises.com with a variety of legacy application mises.org

Solution: Use the built in ASP.Net 2.0 authentication framework to share membership information between sites.

Separating content from presentation

Goal: Allow all content to be presented under any template. For example, a biography can be dynamically presented in the about, web resources, or publication section depending on context

Challenge: the site content existed in a variety of web applications and formats. For example, articles, e-Books, mp3s, store products, PDF's.

Solution: (Detailed in a future post.)

Migrate text content in static files to the database
Collect metadata from all binary files referenced in the database
Tag all content with the collected metadata.
Assign all content a unique identifier
Dynamically load content-specific controls based on the type of object requested. For example, video files render a video player, text files show in browser, external URL's redirect.

Sharing and personalizing content

Goal: Create a library of reusable controls which can be used across web applications to present views of various site data

Challenge: There are many different kinds of data - lists of links, books, resources, media, etc.

Solution: Create a standard set of "Sidebar" controls, and populate them with self-contained user controls which can be reused across all Mises domains.

Goal: Allow all content to be syndicated via RSS

Solution: Use RSS Toolkit to dynamically generate RSS/podcast feeds based on a variety of parameters. More here and here.

Goal: allow users to tag, save, and share all content on the site

Solution:

Tagging: Create a tagging framework which allows users to tag any content. Make tagged content available within the site as well as via RSS feeds. (Detailed here.)
Favorites: Any page can be saved to a list of personalized favorites or sent by email.
Social bookmarking: Standard metadata makes social bookmarking easy.

Goal: Enable users to customize the site's content and appearance

Solution:

Customizable homepage: convert user controls to web parts to allow users to select their preferred data view from a web part catalog. (Detailed in a future post.)
Themes: (See below)

Creating the "Web 2.0" look

Goal: Visualize documents from a variety of source and formats via tag clouds

Solution:

Aggregate tag clouds, as well as statistics on user-contributed tags can be viewed centrally.
As users tag documents, the site creates a "personal tag cloud" for each user
To do: Integrate subject-specific tag clouds into the site

Goal: Make navigation more simple and intuitive

Solution: Replace a drop-down menu with dozens of redundant selections with a main menu containing of a few categories and then provide detailed links in section-specific sidebars

Goal: Implement the "Web 2.0" look

Solution: New theme: gradients, large uniform fonts, simple color palette, standard feed icons, rounded content containers.

Goal: Allow customizable user themes.

Solution:

Mises.com runs Community Server, which has themes built in.
For Mises.org migrate all formatting to use the ASP.Net 2.0 Themes feature
(To do:) allow users to choose their own theme.

The Mises Tech Update : Web Technology

Mises Tagging Overview

How I converted Mises.org to Web 2.0 (Part 1)