GitHub, a project hosting platform, has today introduced a new feature to help developers find project repositories similar to the one they’re looking for. This feature will classify the repositories based on common subjects, related to the project and topics that interest an user.
The new tool has been aptly named ‘Topics’ as it provides users with labels for searching repositories. These categories include technology, project-type, language, community, and other subjects defined by the repository admin. The new feature will magnify user’s knowledge in its domain by offering an easier exploration toggle. One can also contribute to the repositories in which they’re interested in.
The tool is applicable for both public and private repositories; though it will only work in a private repository if the user has access authority. Github has channelized machine technology and natural language processing to debut this feature. The learning and processing capabilities installed within, first analyze and then suggest topics to the users. An admin can reject or accept a topic based on his preferences. Although topic suggestions are not applicable for private repositories as they may injure privacy concerns.
Moreover, adding topics to repositories will also help other developers discover your projects. Thus, the feature can be said to possess a dual functionality. Talking about the launch, Shay Frendt, a senior engineer at GitHub comments,
We’re at the start of this new journey and rejecting suggestions that don’t fit well will help us train our model for more meaningful results.Topics will continue to grow as we learn more from you and better understand GitHub’s role in project discovery. We can’t wait to see how you use this new feature!
This is the next big update for the platform after the enterprise rolled out GitHub Enterprise 2.5. The said update brought new features like a better way to add new users to large installations, more ways to collaborate on projects, and other tools and updates that’ll help support your team as it gets bigger.
The Topics feature will also allow admins to add tags to a repositories’ main pages, which will be displayed at the bottom of the description of a project. You can add as many labels as you want to, to your projects and find some similar ones.
