Tagging Natural Objects

How to choose a sufficient and limited set of tags for tagging things is a frequently asked question in Personal Information Management. Those sets of tags are called controlled vocabulary (CV). I wrote about some aspects about CVs in this article about classification and in this article about folder hierarchies. Please do read my general recommendations on using tags in an efficient way.

This article follows one approach to classify general natural objects within 49 or 17 general dimensions. Those dimensions can be used for tagging arbitrary natural objects. The neat thing about this approach is that the way the dimensions were derived should assure a maximum consensus.

While listening to a German podcast episode, I learned about the scientific research paper "Revealing the multidimensional mental representations of natural objects underlying human similarity judgements". Here is the abstract:

Objects can be characterized according to a vast number of possible criteria (such as animacy, shape, colour and function), but some dimensions are more useful than others for making sense of the objects around us. To identify these core dimensions of object representations, we developed a data-driven computational model of similarity judgements for real-world images of 1,854 objects. The model captured most explainable variance in similarity judgements and produced 49 highly reproducible and meaningful object dimensions that reflect various conceptual and perceptual properties of those objects. These dimensions predicted external categorization behaviour and reflected typicality judgements of those categories. Furthermore, humans can accurately rate objects along these dimensions, highlighting their interpretability and opening up a way to generate similarity estimates from object dimensions alone. Collectively, these results demonstrate that human similarity judgements can be captured by a fairly low-dimensional, interpretable embedding that generalizes to external behaviour.

The original paper is locked away by Elsevier here. Luckily, there is a preprint version of the paper here.

I also found this Twitter thread of one of the authors.

Here, I don't want to discuss the paper in detail. Please do read it yourself. This article is using the results of that paper and applies it to tagging processes.

Researchers of the paper derived conceptual and perceptual properties of real-world images of 1,854 objects. Thousands of people from the USA were asked to chose one non-matching image within sets of three images (odd-one-out task).

The result was then interpreted by researchers that came up with 49 dimensions that should be sufficient to classify general objects. Using reasonable simplification this was even more reduced to 17 dimensions.

I extracted those dimensions for you:

From: "Extended Data Figure 2"

1. made of metal/artificial/hard
2. food-related/eating-related/kitchen-related
3. animal-related/organic
4. clothing-related/fabric/covering
5. furniture-related/household-related/artifact
6. plant-related/green
7. outdoors-related
8. transportation/motorized/dynamic
9. wood-related/brown
10. body part-related
11. colorful
12. valuable/special occasion-related
13. electronic/technology
14. sport-related/recreation-related
15. disc-shaped/round
16. tool-related
17. many small things/coarse pattern
18. paper-related/thin/flat/text-related
19. fluid-related/drink-related
20. long/thin
21. water-related/blue
22. powdery/fine-scale pattern
23. red
24. feminine (stereotypically)/decorative
25. bathroom-related/sanitary
26. black/noble
27. weapon/danger-related/violence
28. music instrument-related/noise-related
29. sky-related/flying-related/floating-related
30. spherical/ellipsoid/rounded/voluminous
31. repetitive
32. flat/patterned
33. white
34. thin/flat
35. disgusting/bugs
36. string-related
37. arms/legs/skin-related
38. shiny/transparent
39. construction-related/physical work-related
40. fire-related/heat-related
41. head-related/face-related
42. beams-related
43. eating-related/put things on top
44. container-related/hollow
45. child-related/toy-related
46. medicine-related
47. has grating
48. handicraft-related
49. cylindrical/conical

From "Extended Data Table 1"

1. weapon/danger-related: weapon
2. transportation/dynamic: vehicle
3. furniture-related: furniture
4. electronic/technology: electronic device
5. animal-related: animal
6. sport-related: sports equipment
7. clothing-related: clothing
8. fluid-related/drink-related: drink
9. food-related: food
10. child/toy-related: toy
11. instrument-related: musical instrument
12. body part-related: body part
13. medicine-related: medical equipment
14. tool-related: tool
15. container-related/hollow: container
16. insects/disgusting: insect
17. plant-related/green: plant

The dimensions do not translate well to the typical form of tags. Tags are usually single words (no spaces) and are used in their plural form by convention. Therefore, you do have to generalize the dimension names.

If I would use those dimensions to tag using my workflows and tools:

1. Derive a general term per dimension (in plural)
2. Write those terms in a .filetags text file
3. Optionally add the whole dimension description to the file in the form of comment lines.
4. Put the .filetags file within the folder hierarchy that holds the files to tag.

Since the research data was derived by US people alone, there is a chance of cultural bias. Therefore, the dimensions might look different for different cultures.

The data only refers to natural objects. This is the reason that those dimensions are not useful for any limited scope of things to tag such as images of plants only.

You should also read:

• How to tag (including my personal tagging rules)