Ideas for tagging system – should I categorize tags

database-designtagging

I built a simple website which allows users to post their profiles, classifieds and events. Now the thing is that I have a generic tagging system in place here. A user can add tags to define his/her profile, classifieds and events.

As an as a user includes new tags – I noticed that certain tags a user uses in certain places becomes accessible in other places. Example a user tags an event as birthday party – however when I wish to browse through tags for lets say classifieds or to add tags to a classified from a list the tag birthday party comes up. This seems a bit out of order here and I was wondering whats the correct approach to deal with a situation like this?

EDIT ====

Basically I have two tables – one is the tags table which holds id numbers and the tag text. The other is a tag links table which has the columns:

tag ID – item Tagged – Item ID tagged

where tag ID is the ID of the tag and item tagged is the nature of the item tagged i.e profile, classifeids or events etc and item id is the ID of the item that was tagged.

Its scaleable but the thing is that all the tags in the tag table are accessible in all the forms wherever tagging is set up. How do I fix this?

Best Answer

A separate tags table for each content type certainly seems sensible. It would also make it easier to separate out the different content types when a user searches for a tag. So you could then have three columns of results, one for each content type.

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