Motivation
This project started out as a traditional semantic file system, and has ended up as a hierarchical tag based wiki system. I decided to move in a webward direction because of the shortcomings I've seen with traditional search engines and content sharing sites. In the early day of the World Wide Web people would curate lists of sites on a given topic. As the amount of content online increased it became intractable to keep an up to date list of all the fitting pages, and people began working on automated web crawlers that would index the ever growing Web. Nowadays search rankings are very important, many businesses live or die given their position on the results page. This has made Search Engine Optimization a minor industry, along with low quality sites that make money through gaming the search ranking algorithm to get views for ad revenue.
But why stop at just links to websites? Really what this is all about is categorizing knowledge. I love trivia and tidbits, I'm an obnoxious knowitall who loves to hand out free samples of info nuggets (note to self: Info Nuggets better name than SemioTag?). And so that's how SemioTag came to be what it is now, an novel infotainment site.
How It Works
It's pretty simple, Articles and Files, can have Tags applied to them, and Tags can have parent and child tags. For example the "Washington State" Tag could have the "Seattle" Tag as a child, which then has a "Space Needle" Tag. When you search for a Tag it includes everything tagged by all the descendant Tags as well. So you could tag a picture with the "Space Needle" Tag, and it would show up in a search of only "Washington". This is a similar system to what many blogging platforms allow you to do, by adding a list of categories to a blog post, but much better in that you only have to tag Items with lowest level of specificity, and since the Tags are existing 'things' and not just text strings you don't have to worry about typos and casing.
When Can I See It?
Soon! The core functionality of the site is done, but I'm concerned about the site going viral for a day and finding out that I've racked up an enormous server bill.