Tag Structure and Autotagging

All opinion, just writing it out to elaborate on my thought process.

Structure / Search

I think re-structuring tags so they each have a category (enum just like to day, maybe with a few additions) but can also Tag other Tags will leave us with a good hierarchy that's searchable bottom-up and top-down.

Some tree examples:

• (Category) Weapon
  • Sword
    • Long Sword
    • Short Sword
    • Dagger
    • Scimitar
    • Rapier
  • Axe
    • Greataxe
    • Hand axe
    • Throwing Axe
  • Hammer
    • Warhammer
    • Blacksmith Hammer
• (Category) Location
  • Aquatic
    • Ocean
    • River
  • Underground
    • Cavern
    • Dungeon
• (Category) Armor
  • Armored
    • Plate
    • Scale
    • Chain
  • Unarmored
  • Clothed
    • Robes
    • Shirt
• (Category) Class
  • Spellcaster
    • Sorcerer
    • Wizard
    • Cleric
    • Druid
  • Martial
    • Rogue
    • Monk
    • Fighter

This would let us have a lot of power in two key searching methods.

Bottom-up search

Bottom-up searching is how I'd describe what we're doing today and is mostly working fine. A user specifies a set of exact tags, and we give them the things that have all those tags. Ex - "I want an orc female who is dualwielding daggers!" With the improved search page we'll get a lot more flexibility/usability in this scenario around name-based search, so this case should be handled pretty well regardless of how we structure tags going forward. A hierarchical structure would also help us in cases where there's no exact matches by walking up the tree a bit, Ex - "We don't have any orc females with daggers, but we do have one dualwielding swords"

Top-down browsing

Top-down browsing is what I'm thinking for a more powerful way of aimlessly looking around at the thousands of things that are available. There's probably two main styles of this:

• Search-based - I'm doing something similar to bottom-up searching, but I'm doing it much less structured than normal. Ex- "Ok I want a human male, but I'm not sure what weapon, let's try swords, no strong preference for if it's a longsword, scimitar, or rapier... Oooo I really like this one with a scimitar, he'll work fine." A tag structure would let people slowly narrow down their options.
• Curated - Adding tag categories like "Collection" and "Section" would let us add the ability for users curate their own collections, or formalize official ones like the D&D 5E Monster Manual. Ex - MM has a section "Giants" that I could say includes "Fire Giant", "Hill Giant", and "Ice Giant", the user could click through to my collection and easily access those tags organized in a way other than what was indexed most recently. Side note- We'd probably need a special collection/section creation UI, since they'll be their own tag trees in a sense...

Autotagging

There's a few "classes" of tagging that's most common across all the Minis we have today:

• Creatures - Something that's in a book with a "consistent" description of what it is that doesn't leave too much to interpretation. Ex - A Sahuagin is a humanoid, prefers aquatic terrain, and is fish-like.
• Player Characters - Something that's a "normal" race for a player to pick. Ex - A Female Firbolg Druid wielding a staff wearing a robe.
• Terrain/Other - Scatter terrain or tiles that's used to make the world more interesting. Ex - Barrels or cobblestone tiles.

Creatures

Creatures are BY FAR the most viable option for autotagging. The creature's name is generally in the name of the Mini, we have "samples" of many/most creatures at this point, and nearly every important tag is the same between different versions of the same creature. All Sahuagin will be tagged with "Sahuagin", "Humanoid", "Aquatic". Some might have different weapons that'll need to be added manually, unless the weapon is in the name/description.

Player Characters

This is a bit harder. Creators might name their mini "Firbolg Druid" but really it's irrelevant to the searching user that the creator thinks it's a druid. If they have a Firbolg Cleric that uses a staff, then the Mini might be perfectly fine for them. We'll be able to get a rough start on tagging of these, since most have the basic information, but adding class tags or similar would be much harder.

Terrain/Other

This is either really hard or really easy. Nearly every Barrel will have the same tags. Cobblestone tiles, probably not super easy to get the tagging great, but can get a good start.