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"hierarchical tags" - what are they, how do they work?
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 21, 2012 at 10:33 PM
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.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 21, 2012 at 10:46 PM
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
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 21, 2012 at 10:52 PM
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.
Posted by jimspoon
Aug 21, 2012 at 11:53 PM
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
Posted by jimspoon
Aug 22, 2012 at 12:05 AM
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.