Thanks Jambunathan K. Your concise summary is correct.

As it stands, selective export from Orgmode is already excellent -- combining both #+EXPORT_SELECT_TAGS: and #+EXPORT_EXCLUDE_TAGS: in various ways allows for very precise exporting; this is particularly apparent when dealing with tags at different heading levels.

I am particularly thinking about largish publishing projects, where it would be less easy to add manage individual tags at the level of the heading. Building groups of composite tags from small groups of atomic tags, as needed, and then exporting/excluding those composite tags (plus other atomic tags) would be a neat way of managing this. The atomic tags could remain fairly static and the composite tags could be juggled as needed.

Migrating stuff to Orgmode isn't a big deal -- the interesting part is using the information once it's there.

As I hope is clear, I think Org is fantastic as it stands. For the type of thing I am (already) doing, the only other real solutions are DITA-based -- and Org is a whole lot more fun.

John

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com> wrote:

IIUC, what you are saying is that you would like to define few atomic
tags and a few composite tag. A composite tag is presumably a union of
some of those atomic tags. You need an ability to selectively export of
the items that fall under the composite tag.

Orgmode allows selective viewing (and exporting) of tagged documents. I
think all you need is to define a query and export only the visible
portion of the document. (I don't use tagging much but you can get
useful information from the manual)

It still it beats me how would you solve the problem of migrating
existing word documents in to Orgmode. Looks like that is a much bigger
problem right there than the lack of facility for elaborate hierarchical
organization.

Jambunathan K.