"hierarchical tags" - what are they, how do they work?

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.