====== linux sound tags ======
{{:blog:linux_sound_tags:graph_cropped.png  }}
**Categorizing linux audio applications**

As a first step to clean up the //tag mess// at http://apps.linuxaudio.org I started to visualize "the problem".
It turns out there are ~1800 tagged pages with ~200 unique tags((numbers as of august 9 2008)).

Most of the tags go back to //headlines// in the original data of linux-sound.org. All applicable headings (''<h1>..<h5>'' and ''<li><b>..'')  were used as tags for a given //link// in a flat structure. However interrelations between the tags (headings) have been maintained by tagging the tags themselves. 57 of the 203 tags are not tagged (orphaned, loose), these are either //top-level-tags// or new additions that have not yet been categorized. An index of all tags can be generarated at [[http://apps.linuxaudio.org/?idx=apps:categories|apps.linuxaudio.org]]; a text-file is available with the sources below.

The most commonly used tags are:
    154 software_sound_synthesis_and_music_composition_packages
    145 other_documentation_and_newsworthy_items
    137 all_things_jack
    119 midi_software
    115 linux_audio_tools
    113 tools_to_make_tools
    110 signal_analysis_processing_software
    102 on-line_articles

**Conclusion**

I trashed the initial intention to reduce the number of tags to a manageable amount. On the contrary: some of the //multi_word_tag//s shall be broken up, and the overall conclusion is: We //just// need a better user-interface to browse and assign tags.

[[wiki:dokubookmark]] already prototypes a //check-box// interface to manage tags. For the apps-wiki a tag-cloud or hierarchical display would be needed to ultimately improve usability. 

**More discoveries**

Now made visible, I discovered a bug in the tag-inheritance parser which imported the data from linux-sound to the apps-wiki. There are additional //false// tags to content where a sub-level heading was not closed. Most prominently affected are [[http://apps.linuxaudio.org/apps/categories/saol|SOAL]] and [[http://apps.linuxaudio.org/apps/categories/openal|openAL]].

I'm pondering on a re-import of the data but that would require magic to merge the updates. Magic is the cue, so I'm now writing a perl-script to manage, rename and clean up the tags: {{:blog:linux_sound_tags:dokutagitor.pl}}

**Source**
{{  :blog:linux_sound_tags:graph_all.png?300|image of all tags (1.8MB)}}

The data was generated from the wiki-content (dokuwiki text files) using {{:blog:linux_sound_tags:tagcollect.sh|this}} //grep//py shell-script and [[http://www.graphviz.org/|graphviz]]. The png/jpeg images turned out to be rather large (2400x2200 pixel ~2MB). I suggest you download look at the SVG or render images from source.

  * {{:blog:linux_sound_tags:graph_all.svg?linkonly|SVG}} image of all tags
  * {{:blog:linux_sound_tags:graph_uniq.svg?linkonly|SVG}} image - only categorized tags
  * {{:blog:linux_sound_tags:graph_orphan.svg?linkonly|SVG}} image - only loose tags
  * {{:blog:linux_sound_tags:lao-tags-graphviz.zip|graphviz ''.dot'' sources}} - unzip and process eg. ''fdp tags.dot  -Tpng > graph_all.png''
  * {{:blog:linux_sound_tags:lao-tags-list.txt}} - text file with all tags

**Legend**

The color of each tag gives a hint on how often it is used. This value is also printed in brackets after each tag-name. red color increases with more common usage. white indicates //end-points// and the shades of blue/green jump at usage-counts < 20 , < 40 , >= 40. 

Arrows //should// go from parent //topic-tag// to child //tag// - but the current script does not filter out back-links so the direction is more or less random. it is not relevant for **this** analysis anyway.

{{tag>news www}}