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.
#EVERNOTE WINDOWS TAG CATEGORIES VERSUS TAG HIERARCHIES FREE#
1 Animal 2 Taxa 3 Phylum 4 Species... but tags are clearly not meant for this.Īt the end of the day, structured databases and free tags are alternative and complementary ways of organising our models of reality. For example, you may include the level of each tag in the name of the tag itself, i.e. There are workarounds for most such issues if they are important to you. For example Animal, Black, Panther | Animal, Giraffe, Striped | Albino, Animal, Monkey | Animal, Grey, Monkey will not sort as you would probably want them to. 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. 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. In Evernote, tags are in a single column like all other metadata, e.g. Well you can, sort of (pun not intended). >sort items in a spreadsheet or database table.
>I suspect there are a lot of things you can’t do with tags that you could do with 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. 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. Within this procedure you don’t have to organise the tags hierarchically from the begining. 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. So you may type Energy and have a list with Energy Efficiency, Energy Saving etc. In Evernote and Surfulater, as well as many online tools, as you type a tag you get a list of suggestions. >help in assigning tags, it could also help in browsing items.Īlso quite helpful is auto-suggest / auto-complete. >remind you of other tags you might want to apply to an item. >searching) to find the one you want to tag it with. >way - so you can browse through the tag hierarchy (rather than knowing beforehand or >have tagged similar items before, and you want to make sure you tag this one in the same >hierarchical tagging is a navigational thing. >And it occurred to me that one advantage of "hierarchical tags" - what are they, how do they work?