Getting better data with Tag-It

The Tag-It Tool Version 1

What do you do when you have information about 100s of activities, and you need to categorise them all, but your current database won’t let you add new fields and information? Even if your database will let you add new categories to your data, going in and editing every single record can be a time consuming job.

That’s why we’ve recently re-purposed a tool we built as a pilot for the 2morro festival in the Summer to provide an easy way for users of Plings to add tags and categories to all their data.

Tag-It works by picking out unique activities, and providing users with a simple interface for adding keyword tags, and selecting from pre-defined categories that activities should fall into.

If tag-it detects that an activity is repeated, then instead of having to tag each instance of the activity, Tag-It applies the new categories to every activity in the series, and all the updated tags and categories are soon available through the Plings Output API

We’ll be rolling out the Tag It tool to partners in the Plings pilot soon – and making good use of it when it comes to categorising data ready for returns to the DCSF…(more on that soon…). Get in touch with the team to find out more about how you can make use of Tag-It locally.

Fishing by the Pier

Today we have been doing some work on PLINGS from Get Hooked on Fishing – an organisation that provides positive activities for young people via fishing.

For obvious reasons, quite a lot of the Places to Go for GHoF are not defined buildings, but outdoors! We should get the tool together soon to easily identify and log such venues, but I added one place – Blyth Pier today, and then did a quick check on Flickr and found lots and lots of images:

It would be great to get some of these people to tag their photos with the PLINGS machine tag (plings:place=41940 in this case), and I am sure that there must be lots of other images of Places to Go out there too…

Flickr tag cloud

As you may know, I am a big fan of Tag Clouds. Not just because they look nice, but they are a different way to look at things, aside from the usual bar or pie chart. Anyway, I was checking the PLINGS Places Flickr group today and saw the emerging tag cloud there. A mixture of the machine tags we are trying and then some real words!!

In, out, back…

Just a quick post with a little diagram we have got together, thanks to Lindsay and Darryl at four23. This just illustrates the three main aspects of PL!NGS – getting them in, getting them out, and getting them back! Well, the PL!NG back bit is more about feedback, but intertwined amongst all this is the aspect of machine tags – which I will post up some stuff on very soon…