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

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.