Tag implications

Imagine you are going on vacation to Italy. You know nothing about the country but want to take some reading with you and would love a story that is set in Italy too. You type “Italy” into our search bar and find within the results books such as “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “The Name of the Rose,” “Eat, Pray, Love,” “The Decameron,” and “Romeo and Juliet.” Upon looking at these, you find that while the first three are indeed tagged “Italy,” the last two are not - “Romeo and Juliet”’s only tag indicating its location is “Verona (city),” and “The Decameron” is tagged “Florence.” How did our search know to include them?

Our tag moderators review every new tag that has not been used before. Some they may delete or even put on a global blacklist - ban it from ever being entered again. This will be the case for purely subjective tags, like “bad book” or “favourite”. Some they correct to a different spelling or phrasing, to keep our tags consistent, readable and orthographically correct. Others are being approved and sorted into our tag tree by adding implications. Florence is a city in Italy so the tag “Florence” implies the tag “Italy.” “Italy” in turn implies “Europe” so all above-mentioned books would have been found with a search for “Europe” even though none bear that tag.

Implications don’t have to be singular. Some tags imply multiple others and are implied by many others. On “The Name of the Rose,” you might find “Monastery” which implies both “Building” and “Place of worship.” Maybe “Florence” doesn’t imply “Italy” directly but via “Tuscany.” Our search checks the complete tree for processing results.

Implications are not set in stone once added - we might find that “Monastery” sometimes refers to a single building and sometimes to a whole complex, or that “Vampire” only sometimes implies “Sunlight allergy,” as some authors have their vampires walk around by day. Just like the rest of our site, which will grow and change with its users, implications will develop over time. Keep reading for an explanation of what tags are for us, and how we use them.