I've been impressed by the Delicious extension for Firefox. You type in any tag, and a list of "related tags" is displayed on the fly. For example, if you type in "outline", It shows all the tags that have been assigned to items that have the tag "outline". A list of bookmarked webpages that have the chosen tags appears on the fly. This way it is very easy to zero in very quickly on just the bookmarks you're looking for.

It seems that this would be a great interface for notes program. Is there any such program?

Surfulater enables content organization by folder hierarchy and tags. Unlike delicious tags Surfulater lets you:
1) Use multi-word tags
2) Rename tags
3) Merge tags
4) Add/Remove tags to multiple articles at once.

You can view articles in a Tags Tree and nested tags are automatically generated.

The next release includes Tree Filters enabling you to see only only items in the tree that match the text you type. This works in the tags tree view, folder view and chronological view and lets you quickly drill down and see specific content. More info on our Blog soon. http://blog.surfulater.com

miTaggedMarks (www.mitaggedmarks.com) is a local bookmark manager that uses tags to organize the bookmarks. I has such features like showing "related" tags on-the-fly, and many more for easy handling of tags.

I plan to use it as a basis for an app "miTaggedNotes".

One thing that personally empedes me from using tags more in programs that support them (such as Surfulater) is the arbitrary process of setting one's own tags.

I personally tend to use tags more in academic work. I would therefore love to have some ready-made authoritative hierarchical list of tags / keywords used through libraries and the such. I wouldn't expect it to cover all my needs, but it would be a good starting point.

Anyone aware of such a reference available?

Thanks
Alexander

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I would therefore love to have some
ready-made authoritative hierarchical list of tags / keywords used through
libraries and the such.

Nice idea, but: You would nearly get a complete dictionary then! How do you want to navigate in such a long list, to find the needed tags?
Such list could make sense in "social apps" like Flickr, if it was combined with checks for writing, synonyms, words in different languages and so on.
The purpose should more be to restrict the invention of new tags, but not to navigate to needed tags.

Well, your hint for "hierarchical" lists may show a way for some fields. For example countries or cities, where you could start navigating with "Africa", then "Egypt" to get to the "Pyramids".
BTW: Is everyone aware of the fact, that Egypt is part of Africa? Others would better find "Egypt" from the association to the "Mediterranean Sea", which lies somewhere between Africa, Europe and Asia.

Again, this small example shows a main problem of hierarchical lists (which we wanted to avoid by using tags).
Another way to navigate to the "Pyramids" could be via the "Seven Wonders".

Anyone aware of such a reference available?

Do you know of any application or web site that uses such hierarchy of keywords/tags?

Michael

miTaggedMarks wrote:

Do you know of any application or web site that uses
such hierarchy of keywords/tags?

Michael

The most famous such hierarchical list is the Library of Congress reference, but I haven't seen it anywhere online.

Alexander

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

The most famous such hierarchical list
is the Library of Congress reference, but I haven't seen it anywhere
online.

Update: Here are a couple of links to part of the classification system:
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/
http://geography.about.com/library/congress/bllc.htm

A tool which works very well with tags (in fact it's very hard to use it extensively without resorting to tags) is Evernote. I will be posting a bit about it in the Summer 2009 PIM roll-call thread where it has been mentioned.

I use CintaNotes specifically for the tagging feature. Also has useful Clipping feature that works from any app.
http://cintanotes.com/

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

A tool which works very well with tags (in fact it's very hard to use it extensively
without resorting to tags) is Evernote. I will be posting a bit about it in the Summer
2009 PIM roll-call thread where it has been mentioned.