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I recently noticed the tag suggestion which appears to have been created less than a month ago with 3 questions so far using the tag. I personally can't see any use for this tag beyond very specialised questions and think the or tags are more than sufficient for any question which might otherwise fall under this new tag.

Is the use of overly-specific tags to be discouraged? It seems to me that if this tag survives, then we'd need new tags for group/ring/module/graph/etc. isomorphisms.

Should we remove this tag or merge it with another more suitable tag?

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    $\begingroup$ Seems completely useless. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Oct 1, 2013 at 18:44
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    $\begingroup$ What is the distinction between vector spaces and linear algebra? Isn't the latter the study of the former? $\endgroup$
    – dfeuer
    Oct 2, 2013 at 16:39
  • $\begingroup$ This looks like tag-proliferation to me. It's inadvisable. $\endgroup$ Nov 30, 2013 at 18:07

1 Answer 1

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In general, yes

The use of overly-specific tags is to be discouraged.

This is because that every question can only have five tags, and that tags serves a function of helping organisation and finding of questions.


Personally, in this specific case, I think the tag is not very useful.

But I would point out that there also exists the ; and in it falls questions about graph invariants and other such things. So I am open to hearing about why can be useful.

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    $\begingroup$ I'm open to hearing as to why we need a graph-isomorphism as well... $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Oct 2, 2013 at 7:28
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    $\begingroup$ @AsafKaragila: for graphs, my understanding is that it is not always easy, given two descriptions of graphs, to tell that they are actually isomorphic. In the case of vector spaces without additional structures it is (I believe) somewhat easier. $\endgroup$ Oct 2, 2013 at 7:36
  • $\begingroup$ In particular, I think the one case where a user used (vector-space-isomorphism) in the context of Banach spaces is a mistaken use of the term. Two vector spaces can be isomorphic as vector spaces, but not isomorphic as Banach spaces (which carries information in the norm and topology etc). (Now questions on isomorphisms of TVS are interesting, but I think they don't need special tags.) $\endgroup$ Oct 2, 2013 at 7:39
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    $\begingroup$ I think the case for graph isomorphism is easier because as a problem it has specific relevance to computational complexity (as such it has its own Wikipedia article). I'm not sure I'd be sad to see it go, though, I can't imagine people subscribing to it or ignoring it. $\endgroup$ Oct 4, 2013 at 12:15

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