Back in May I asked: Can elmcity and Delicious continue their partnership? The answer turned out to be no. That’s partly because the new Delicious broke some capabilities I was relying on. But it’s mainly because tagging is so fundamental to the elmcity service that I needed to be able to control, explore, and evolve it.

It continues to evolve, but now’s a good time to review — from the perspective of elmcity curators and contributors — how the principles and mechanisms for tagging calendar feeds (and individual events) illustrate (and extend) some ideas I originally developed during a long infatuation with Delicious. I have a lot to say on this subject, so my plan is to say it in a series of installments of which this is the first.

Principle: Describe things in both general and specific terms

For university calendars, I advise curators to use both a general tag, university, and a specific one. In the case of Seattle some specific tags are uw for the University of Washington, seattleu for Seattle University, and nscc for North Seattle Community College. That makes these views available:

All university-related events, a view that’s currently based on this set of feeds:

University of Washington 376
GoHuskies: Women’s Basketball 22
GoHuskies: Volleyball 3
North Seattle Community College 20
GoHuskies: Basketball 23
Seattle University Redhawks: Basketball 23
Elisabeth Miller Library 15
Seattle University Redhawks: Women’s Basketball 23
Seattle University Redhawks: Volleyball 2
North Seattle Community College (eventful.com) 3
Graduate Student Council at Seattle University – University (facebook.com) 1
Seattle University Redhawks: Swimming 8
Seattle University Redhawks: Women’s Swimming 9
UW Medicine- South Lake Union Campus (eventful.com) 1

Just UW events, based on these feeds:

University of Washington 376
GoHuskies: Women’s Basketball 22
GoHuskies: Volleyball 3
GoHuskies: Basketball 23
Elisabeth Miller Library 15
UW Medicine- South Lake Union Campus (eventful.com) 1

Just NSCC events, based on these feeds:

North Seattle Community College 19
North Seattle Community College (eventful.com) 3

Just Seattle U events, based on these feeds:

Seattle University Redhawks: Basketball 23
Seattle University Redhawks: Women’s Basketball 23
Seattle University Redhawks: Volleyball 2
Graduate Student Council at Seattle University – University (facebook.com) 1
Seattle University Redhawks: Swimming 8
Seattle University Redhawks: Women’s Swimming 9

Mechanism: Multi-tag query

The views above are all based on single-tag queries:

view=university

view=uw

view=nscc

view=seattleu

Here are some examples of multi-tag queries:

view=university,sports (all university sports)

view=seattleu,sports (just Seattle U sports)

view=seattleu,swimming (just Seattle U swimming)

view=university,basketball (all university basketball events)

The last two examples again illustrate the general/specific idea. For sporting events I recommend using the general tag sports and specific tags like swimming and basketball.

Back in 2006, in Del.icio.us is a database, I wrote:

Although it’s intuitively obvious to me, I suspect that most people don’t yet appreciate how easily, and powerfully, tagging systems can work as databases for personal (yet shareable) information management.

Del.icio.us isn’t simply backed by a database, it can function as a database.

I think most people still don’t appreciate that possibility. In the elmcity context I’m hoping to show how it applies not only to personal but also to collective information management.

(This series: elmcity tagging principles.)