Roundware Tags

One of the powerful features of Roundware is its tagging capability. Tags are used to assign metadata to assets, primarily for filtering, but also for archival purposes. Roundware tags are grouped by tag_category, for example, the tags young and old could be tags within the age tag_category.

Tags and tag categories are very flexible and can be setup however makes the most sense for a project. Each asset within a project should be assigned at least one tag from each available tag category for the project in order for the filtering to work properly.

Tags are initially assigned to assets when they are added to the system, either through the admin or by a participant via a client. Tags can be edited thereafter, of course, using the admin. Participants select a tag from each tag category as part of the contribution process. It is advisable to not require participants to select too many tags for their contributions, so most Roundware projects have between 2-3 tag categories.

Also see more info on Tag Setup and Tag Admin.

Tag Relationships

Tags can be related to each other in order to create tag hierarchies. For example, say there is a project with two tag categories:

demographic: child adult

question: What college did you attend? Why is there food all over your face? Make up a story.

You want to ask adults about college and stories, but not food, and you want to ask kids about food and stories, but not college. You can use tag relationships to link the child tag to Why is there food all over your face? and Make up a story. and the adult tag to What college did you attend? and Make up a story. This will cause the user interface to present a different set of questions depending on which demographic is chosen. Obviously, one must ensure that the ordering of the tag categories is set properly so that demographic is presented to the user prior to question.

Tag Data

The tag.data field is a temporary field. Currently, it is being used to set the html class of the tag for display in the tag webviews, for example class=tag-one.

We intend to expand the tags data from a field into a new tag_data model such that an arbitrary number of additional pieces of data can be stored with a tag. This becomes very useful for situations such as when a tag is used to indicate an object that has a physical location (i.e. a sculpture in a sculpture park). In these situations, tag data of types latitude and longitude could be created and used for a multitude of purposes within the clients and back-end.