just a quick question - I think Alexander mentioned the use of hierarchical tags in Evernote. I am wondering what they are and how they work.

I assume it means that tags are linked to each other in a hiearchy - for example "operating system" might be a parent tag, "desktop" "mobile" might be child tags, and "iOS", "Android", "Windows Phone" "BlackBerry" might be child tags under "mobile"

so ... is an item tagged with a "child" tag automatically tagged with its parent tag as well?

can be items tagged with a parent tag be sorted by the applicable child tags?

What other advantages do hierarchical tags offer?

I am probably missing something, but it seems to me hierarchical tags don't offer much advantage. I mean I will get the same result searching for the tag "dog" as I will for one with the hierarch "Animals-Dog." Yes, in a program like Evernote, you can display your tags in a hierarchical list, but how much of an advantage is this?

So I join Jim in asking the question.

Steve Z.

I look at hierarchical tags (categories) this way. Assume that you tag your items with one or more leaf tags (In Steve's case "Dog"). The leaf tags represent the most specific categorization of the item.

The key is that that tagging implies the tagging at the higher levels in the hierarchy as well. You shouldn't have to do that explicitly - the system should do it internally.

Thus, when you want to find all your "dogs" just search on that tag. If you want to find all your animals, search on "animal" which should automatically bring up dogs, and cats, and fish and whatever else is tagged with "children" of animal.

It gets more interesting with more than two levels - and if you can "and" and "or" across tags (categories).

Charles

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

... I mean I will get the same result searching for the tag "dog" as I will for one
with the hierarch "Animals-Dog."

I don't know about Evernote, but in some other apps, hierarchical tags work as Jim surmised - tagging with a child tag also tags the item with its parent tags. So, if your Animals tag had two children: Dogs and Cats, you could tag Fido as Dog and Fluffy as Cat. Then, searching for Dog would get you Fido, but searching for Animals would get you both Fido and Fluffy without your having to tag each as Animals.

Evernote doesn't have any tag inheritance. In fact, the tag hierarchy doesn't affect the notes in any way - it's simply a way to arrange and organize the tags themselves. It does come in handy if you have a lot of tags and then want to browse by tag on a mobile device.

I find Evernote to be weak on actually organizing information - there is no metadata like in UR or Zoot, so you have to add a lot of tags if you really want to slice and dice information, and even then it won't offer the same database-type queries. I do use it as a sort of digital junk drawer for web clippings and material I need access to wherever I am.

Chris

I've been without my PC for a couple of days (quite exhilarating actually) and though I saw this question in my Android phone, I wanted to be back and test it in practice to ensure my recollection was correct. It was.

jimspoon wrote:

I assume it means that tags
are linked to each other in a hiearchy - for example "operating system" might be a
parent tag, "desktop" "mobile" might be child tags, and "iOS", "Android", "Windows
Phone" "BlackBerry" might be child tags under "mobile"

Precisely.

so ... is an item tagged with
a "child" tag automatically tagged with its parent tag as well?

Not in Evernote. I believe this happens in other software discussed here, specifically MDE Infohandler. I believe that Daly made once a very detailed description of this, but was unable to locate it in the outliners.com archives (it was probably in 2005)

can be items tagged
with a parent tag be sorted by the applicable child tags?

Not sure what you mean by 'sorted'. If you mean 'selected', yes. For example, I have parent tag Operations and child tag Logistics. I can click on Operations, hold Ctrl, click on Logistics, and only get the items that have been tagged with both.

This works with any selction of tags of course, regardless of their relationship.

What other advantages do
hierarchical tags offer?

The main advantage, for me at least, is clarity in their conceptual logic and ease in organisation.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Yes, in a program like Evernote, you can display
your tags in a hierarchical list, but how much of an advantage is this?

The advantage is the same as with hierarchical folders; when you have a lot of them, hierarchies help in their organisation and maintaining the overview.

In fact, as I've written in the past, I believe that hierarchical tags (several of which can be applied to an info item) and hierarchical folders with clonable items (allowing for the same item to exist in multiple folders) are different routes to the same result, though each may have certain advantages http://www.outlinersoftware.com/archives/viewt/2387

So, just as you don't expect files in a child folder to also show up in the parent folder, you should not expect items with a child tag to also be labeled with the parent tag.

It may be supported by the software (e.g. as Directory Opus allows one to view all files in a folder's subfolders in one flat view) or it may not.

All of a sudden I realized that i have been implenting a system of hierarchical tags in Ecco and now Infoqube for a long time now - by using the fields (or folders) as hierarchical tags.

For example I keep a inventory of my computer components in Infoqube.

I have the fields arranged hierarchically - here are some of my fields:

Computers and Electronics
-- Audio
---- Microphone
---- Sound Cards
---- Speakers
-- Imaging
---- Camcorders
---- Digital Cameras
---- Scanners
---- Webcams
-- Storage Device
---- Disk Drive - Hard
---- Disk Drive - Optical
---- Drive Enclosures / Docks
---- Flash Memory Card Reader
---- Flash Memory Cards
------ compactflash
------ memory stick
------ sd
------ micro sd
---- USB Flash Drives

And so on.

And it occurred to me that one advantage of hierarchical tagging is a navigational thing. Suppose you want to to tag an item - you have tagged similar items before, and you want to make sure you tag this one in the same way - so you can browse through the tag hierarchy (rather than knowing beforehand or searching) to find the one you want to tag it with. And seeing the tags in a hierarchy can remind you of other tags you might want to apply to an item. Just as the hierarchy might help in assigning tags, it could also help in browsing items.

It occurs to me that tagging is just a much looser way of categorizing information than the database model of tables, fields, values - without distinction of what is a table, what is a field, what is a value.

For example
Dog
---- Fido
Dog Breeds
---- German Shepherd
---- Poodle
Cat
---- Persian
------ Fluffy

Fido might be a value in the "Name" field in the "Individual Animals" table. "German Shepherd" might be a value in the Name field in the Dog Breeds table. "Dog" and "Cat" might be values in the Name field in the Species table.

I suspect there are a lot of things you can't do with tags that you could do with a more structured database. But it doesn't require the same kind of predefined structure. it's sort of a middle ground between a structured database and just searching for text. You might find yourself thinking - if I'm going to go to the trouble of tagging items thoroughly - I might as well make a structured database for it. Or you might end up concluding that tagging is just too much trouble and just rely on text search instead.

I have not used tags nearly as much as I might have ... I haven't liked the interfaces I've seen much. I just noticed that Gmail supports hierarchical tags; I guess Google Docs must also. I'll have to try that out. I would like to browse through my email senders in Gmail - for this purpose it would be good to have a Senders tag with a subtag for all my senders, automatically created by Gmail.

jim

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

>can be items tagged
>with a
parent tag be sorted by the applicable child tags?

Not sure what you mean by
'sorted'. If you mean 'selected', yes. For example, I have parent tag Operations and
child tag Logistics. I can click on Operations, hold Ctrl, click on Logistics, and
only get the items that have been tagged with both.

This works with any selction of
tags of course, regardless of their relationship.

By "sorting" I meant the way you might sort items in a spreadsheet or database table. Say you have a bunch of items tagged with this tag hierarchy:

Animal
-- Antelope
-- Bear
-- Cat
-- Dog

So you might display all your items tagged with Animal in a table - and then sort all of these items by the subtags - so that the items tagged with Antelope would be first, followed by the Bear items, etc.

Your example of how to select multiple tags reminded me of something. One time I was working with Delicious and suddenly it hit me how multiple tags could be used to gradually narrow in on what you want ... at that time I was looking for a way to find items related to my T-Mobile Wing phone, which ran the the Windows Mobile operating system. "windows mobile" items might be tagged with "windows mobile", "windowsmobile" "winmo", etc. But what if they were tagged with two separate tags - "windows" and "mobile" - instead? Neither by itself is what I'm looking for - but if each tag is used together in this way - it could do the trick. If tagging was done in this way - it might make it easier to find items combining two different concepts.

jimspoon wrote:

And it occurred to me that one advantage of
hierarchical tagging is a navigational thing. Suppose you want to to tag an item - you
have tagged similar items before, and you want to make sure you tag this one in the same
way - so you can browse through the tag hierarchy (rather than knowing beforehand or
searching) to find the one you want to tag it with. And seeing the tags in a hierarchy can
remind you of other tags you might want to apply to an item. Just as the hierarchy might
help in assigning tags, it could also help in browsing items.

Also quite helpful is auto-suggest / auto-complete. In Evernote and Surfulater, as well as many online tools, as you type a tag you get a list of suggestions. So you may type Energy and have a list with Energy Efficiency, Energy Saving etc.

You may then add a tag like Energy Services that does not already exist and this will be added to the list of tags, ready to be suggested next time.

Within this procedure you don't have to organise the tags hierarchically from the begining. You can start of with a flat list and then, when a certain category gets a large number of tags, to group them together, possibly in multiple levels.

You should also think that tags may be used to denote completely different attributes of information items, like Ownership, Colour, Engine Type, especially if your database incudes items of different types, so it can really become very confusing to just have a long flat list.

I suspect there are a lot of things you can't do with tags that you could do with
a more structured database.

Sorting is an example; see next post.

jimspoon wrote:

By "sorting" I meant the way you might
sort items in a spreadsheet or database table.

Well you can, sort of (pun not intended). In Evernote, tags are in a single column like all other metadata, e.g. Notebook, Size, URL... So you can select items with parent tag Animal, and then sort by the Tags column so this should group the items by type of animal.

However, there's a catch: because all tags are in the same column, one after the other in alphabetical order, other irrelevant tags may interfere with the sort order. For example Animal, Black, Panther | Animal, Giraffe, Striped | Albino, Animal, Monkey | Animal, Grey, Monkey will not sort as you would probably want them to.

There are workarounds for most such issues if they are important to you. For example, you may include the level of each tag in the name of the tag itself, i.e. 1 Animal 2 Taxa 3 Phylum 4 Species... but tags are clearly not meant for this.

At the end of the day, structured databases and free tags are alternative and complementary ways of organising our models of reality. If you've read "Everything is miscelaneous" you know that reality does not fit into our well structured models and therefore tags represent a more flexible approach. However, within a specific subset of reality, tags may not be ideal. For example, if you just want to organise your stamp collection, a structured stamp collection database is probably the best choice. So it all has to do with your own interests --and I know that this group's interest are very broad.

Your example of how to select multiple tags reminded me of
something. One time I was working with Delicious and suddenly it hit me how multiple
tags could be used to gradually narrow in on what you want ...

I have this precise approach in the wonderful LinkStash bookmarking program which employs folders as its main organisational feature but also support tags (in a flat list). I have links to all interesting software there with tags like Adobe AIR, Java, Linux, Mac, Mobile, Web, Windows and can select by any combination. The point is that these categories are not mutually inclusive or exclusive. So a Java program is not necessarily cross-platform, and for a Web tool there may be a mobile version or there may be not.

CintaNotes has introduced "hierarchical tabs" in the latest version of their excellent notetaking product.

From their web page www.cintanotes.com - "You can now define hierarchical tags using the "/" symbol. CintaNotes will automatically assign parent tags when you assign children, and remove children when you remove parents".


Jack

CintaNotes seems to be the most consistently developed note taking program I have ever come across...

Jack Crawford wrote:

CintaNotes has introduced "hierarchical tabs" in the latest version of their
excellent notetaking product.

One thing about the tag-based organizers (like Evernote) - is that the user interfaces have not seemed very friendly.

There needs to be instant search capability, both for tags to filter by, and for matching items.

For example, when looking for a tag to filter by ... as you start typing in a string, you are shown the tags that match that string, and you can select an applicable tag or tags as soon as you see it.

Also - once you have filtered by one tag - you should be presented with a list of the tags that are also found in conjunction with the selected tag. So, if I have filtered my items by an "android" tag, I should see only the other tags that have been applied to items that have the "android" tag.

Actually I am describing what I saw in the Delicious sidebar for firefox, or maybe it was the Tagsifter extension for Firefox ... it seemed well thought out.

If anybody has seen a really good implementation for browsing through tags, or finding tags to filter by ... I would love to hear about it.

I think TreeProjects handles tags in the way you describe Jim.

Jack