Tag Based vs Hierarchical Data Management

Tag Based vs Hierarchical Data Management

Tag Based
- Features:
  - Hierarchical Tags
  - Attribute-Value Tags
- Ways:
  - All files will be in the same folder
Hierarchical
- Features:
  - Folders
- Ways:
  - All files will be in separate folders

Notes:

Some people hate the idea of hierarchical tags

Some ideas:

Hierarchical Tags are useful when you want to fit a property into a category in addition to the subcategory.
- Example: With regards to discussion forums, etc. where you may sometimes want to seek help from just the specific community, and other times from the broader community.
Hierarchical Tags show tag relationships
- Example: In StackOverflow, integrals is a subset of calculus. In other examples, using one tag makes it an umbrella for many other tags, so we can only use an umbrella tag.
It is better for a file picker to select by tags
- Example: When looking for a file, use the tags projects/blender, donut, white. This also lets you easily add more descriptions to the files.
- If you want to select multiple files, you could just group them all under yet another umbrella tag, for example, if you want both donuts and plates to be listed in a single window without listing all projects by using just projects/blender, you could use a tag like kitchen and supply projects/blender, kitchen to get all of them.
You can't expect the users to tag all files individually
- People are lazy, and put stuff in new folders, or save everything to desktop.
- We can fix it by listing everything as untagged, and creating new-tags. Just copying what they do with folders.
Tags can lead to a keyboard-centric approach
- There can be many tags when there are too many files. So, selecting tags by mouse won't be easier than navigating folders, where only a few folders are displayed at once.
  - Perhaps one can set a parent tags section with only a limited number of tags, and when you select them, you can select their subtags.
  - However, that will mean you have to separate parent tags and adjective tags. At this point, the function of parent tags become similar to that of folders, except that they still can have multiple parent tags.
  - The number of parent tags will then be limited by the user's own preferences. However, it is possible that even that can reach too many, if we consider the Johnny Decimal System, where up to 10000 folders are possible.
  - The keyboard workflow will definitely become popular. The keyboard workflow exists in folder paradigms, however, it will become more useful in the tag paradigm.
Tags can lead to files getting lost
- It's questionable. Still, when files are placed in folders, they remain inside one of them. But when files are tagged, they all remain in one location, only identified by their tags. But with this approach, they could become lost among too many files if you forget which tags you used for them. So I guess it's more reasonable than questionable.
- But one can fix this by the separation of parent tags and adjective tags, as I stated before.
The two ideas available so far are
- Use of parent tags
- Use of folders and tags based on a simplified alternative to Johnny Decimal System
Think about organizing files in paper
- Even if you follow the Zettelkasten system, we'll want to file the notes separately for easier accessibility, than look at the tags each time. Oh-wait. Zettelkasten was not that dumb, and was genius. It used indexing rather than tagging.
- But then there had to be some way to find a specific note. Categorizing them would make it different from the Zettelkasten indexing system, and finding files of a specific index would be difficult. You would have to both tag the file and specify its category.
- That would be similar to the idea of parent tags as I said before. But more accurately, this is like WordPress style categories, in addition to indexes.
- Instead, what was used (later) was a separately collected set of notes called Maps of Contents. A Map of Contents could come under another Map of Contents. These Maps of Contents would be organized in categories.
  - The original Zettelkasten method used fleeting notes, literature notes and permanent notes.
Attribute-Value Tags can be more extensible than Hierarchical Tags (Tagging Tags)?

More ideas: https://authorguide.learnosity.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000434878-How-Do-Tag-Hierarchies-Work