Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
[snip]
So, for example, the hierarchy would be something like this:
Children
---Young Readers
-------Genre A
-------Genre B
-------Genre C
---Middle Readers
-------Genre A
-------Genre B
-------Genre C
---Young Adult
-------Genre A
-------Genre B
-------Genre C
But let's say I want to do a search for all children's books in Genre A across all the age groups, or all books for young readers across all genres. I am just not sure what the best way to set all of this up should be.
If I use the genre tag for Genre A, Genre B, Genre C etc. then how do I split them by age? Do I need a separate tag for that? And what if I have non-children books which are the same genre (for example, children's mystery novels and adult mystery novels).
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The issue you are facing is that your genres are not hierarchical. "Young Adult" and "A" are separate genres, or at least separate somethings. Each of words has meaning entirely independent of the other words. From the hierarchy point of view, all of 'Young Adult', 'A', 'A.Young Adult', and 'Young Adult.A' are valid. A hierarchy is stating that a word has meaning only in the context of some other word, which isn't your case.
From what you say, you want to have alternate organizations of independent information. This is one of the things user categories are good for. You would mark each book with the multiple genres it belongs in, some of which might be hierarchical, some (in your case most) not. You would then create several user categories to view the information in the ways you most commonly wish. Your example provides one, your text provides another.
Quote:
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Is setting up the genre as 'children.mystery' going to exclude these books as part of a general search for mystery?
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No. Searching for '#genre:mystery.' will find the word mystery no matter where it occurs in a hierarchy. Unfortunately, it will find all of 'mystery', 'english mystery', and 'vampire mystery'. There is currently no way to do an 'equals' search to match exactly some internal item in a hierarchy.
Reflecting a bit: It could be that the items (genres in this case) are 'mostly' hierarchical, in that the most common view is the one provided by the hierarchy. In this case, searching for an embedded item would be relatively uncommon. I can probably provide a search method to slice out embedded members of a hierarchy to remove the 'unfortunately' caveat above, probably something like #genre:=..mystery (note the second dot). However, I am reluctant to add these to the tag browser's 'click' searches, because doing so would increase the complexity of something that is already very complex. It would require two more 'states' (equals embedded and not equals embedded) in addition to the 5 that are already there. Opinions?