Forum Posts Feed
"hierarchical tags" - what are they, how do they work?
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 22, 2012 at 07:35 AM
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.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 22, 2012 at 08:09 AM
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.
Posted by Jack Crawford
Aug 24, 2012 at 02:20 AM
CintaNotes has introduced “hierarchical tabs” in the latest version of their excellent notetaking product.
From their web page http://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
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 24, 2012 at 06:21 PM
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.
Posted by jimspoon
Aug 27, 2012 at 09:49 PM
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.