RowanChristmas 10/03/05 -- Labels are, I think, a really nice way to organize large sets of attributes. For browser functionality, they take the place of the "tabs" we used to have, and provide a faster, more configurable browsing. This also lets me do export of certain attributes on different subsets of nodes/edges.
EthanCerami - 10/04/05 -- Sounds like a good idea. Is this a feature that we need for Cytoscape 2.2, or can we defer it until a later date? The reason I ask is that getting us all to agree on CyAttributes is probably going to take some time, and we might be better able to reach resolution if we focus on core functionality first. Anyone else have thoughts on this?
IlianaAvila - 10/04/05 -- I agree that grouping attributes is necessary, for example, for expression data (experiment has a series of conditions). But, I think they should not be named "labels". It is confusing. Rowan: Does your attribute browser make use of "labels"? If so, if we want to use your browser for 2.3, we need to have "labels", but please, lets rename them!
James McIninch - 10/6/05 -- I believe that the consensus (flickr, deli.cio.us, etc.) is that these are called "tags".
RowanChrismtas 10/06/05 -- Tags!!!! Much better name. Some variuos use cases:
- Tag each Attribute in a speadsheet with the name of the spreadsheet so you know which attributes were loaded together and can be viewed as a group.
Use a Tag as input for other plugins, eg display all tagged attributes in a RadarNode, export the same tag for each network.
- The way they are used now as storing different views of attributes.
GaryBader - Oct.12.2005 - As Rowan originally had, I think we should implement a very basic api for tags that just allows grouping of attributes under a string name. Basically, maintain a set of named sets. We could add more functionality in a later version to deal with metadata on the tags.
AllanKuchinsky - October 12, 2005 -- would we want to consider tags to be complex attributes? Is there any leverage to be gotten from the Multihash data structures? Or is this imposing too much structure? Also, are tags ephemeral or are they meant to persist? If the former, then using multihash would definitely be overkill.
EthanCerami - October 13, 2005 -- Cytoscape developers group voted to accept the CyAttributes API, but defer labels until a later release.