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"hierarchical tags" - what are they, how do they work?
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Posted by jimspoon
Aug 20, 2012 at 08:14 PM
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?
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 21, 2012 at 08:22 PM
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.
Posted by CRC
Aug 21, 2012 at 09:30 PM
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
Posted by gunars
Aug 21, 2012 at 09:33 PM
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.
Posted by Chris Murtland
Aug 21, 2012 at 09:55 PM
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