Tags management strategies

Tags management strategies

[Martin Leduc]

Hi !

Tags are a very useful feature to filter information in org-mode. After 
few years of developing a system to organize my life with org-mode, I 
realize that tags can become rather difficult to deal with as we tend to 
define a lot of tags spread out over several org files.

One general issue is to track all the tags that you have defined in all 
your org files. Rather than requesting an org-mode feature that would 
make a dynamical list of all the defined tags, I personally prefer the 
approach of making a static list of all preferred tags in one place and 
to try to keep this list as small as I can. I can achieve this by 
defining a global list of tags through the variable "org-tag-alist", 
which allows to access all the tags from any of my org files, and also 
because it allows to make "grouptags" which are very convenient to 
organize tags by themes.

The latter approach seems however limited to the use of a rather small 
number of tags since in the fast-tag-selection interface, tags entries 
beyond the 33th are marked with extended ASCCI characters such as ^?, 
\200, \201,... So my first question is how can I access these tags, and 
if it is possible, what is the physical limit in terms of the number of 
tags I can define and access ?

My second question is a bit more general, but I would like to know what 
peoples are currently doing to manage, track and make an efficient use 
of their numerous tags.

Many thanks,

Martin

Re: Tags management strategies

[Samuel Wales]

i skip tags almost entirely in favor of regular expression search.  :)

-- 
The Kafka Pandemic: http://thekafkapandemic.blogspot.com

The disease DOES progress.  MANY people have died from it.  And
ANYBODY can get it.

Denmark: free Karina Hansen NOW.

Re: Tags management strategies

[Karl Voit]

* Martin Leduc <ldcmrtn@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi !

Hi!

> Tags are a very useful feature to filter information in org-mode. 

Not only in org-mode ;-)[1][2]

> After few years of developing a system to organize my life with
> org-mode, I realize that tags can become rather difficult to deal
> with as we tend to define a lot of tags spread out over several
> org files.

I can copy this from my personal experience as well from PIM
research about tags. Huge field of research. But IMHO difficult to
compare: tags of images, tags for arbitrary files, tags for
bookmarks, tags for reference management, ...

> One general issue is to track all the tags that you have defined in all 
> your org files. 

OK, so you already made the evolutionary step from "hey, there are
tags - let's use as many of them as possible" to a controlled
vocabulary and then a *limited* controlled vocabulary. Good.

> Rather than requesting an org-mode feature that would 
> make a dynamical list of all the defined tags, I personally prefer the 
> approach of making a static list of all preferred tags in one place and 
> to try to keep this list as small as I can. 

That would be my recommendation as well.

> I can achieve this by defining a global list of tags through the
> variable "org-tag-alist", which allows to access all the tags from
> any of my org files, and also because it allows to make
> "grouptags" which are very convenient to organize tags by themes.

I maintain file-local variables for Org-mode files:
      #+TAGS: account advertisement agile ...

Different files cope with different contexts and therefore the
vocabularies overlap very vaguely. For example my business life
(professional SW development in an agile enterprise environment)
requires totally different tags than my private work with PIM
research/tools, contact management, house building, reference
management, and so forth.

> The latter approach seems however limited to the use of a rather small 
> number of tags since in the fast-tag-selection interface, tags entries 
> beyond the 33th are marked with extended ASCCI characters such as ^?, 
> \200, \201,... So my first question is how can I access these tags, and 
> if it is possible, what is the physical limit in terms of the number of 
> tags I can define and access ?

I do not use grouptags and tend to (manually) synchronize file
tags[2] with my private Org-mode tags.

> My second question is a bit more general, but I would like to know what 
> peoples are currently doing to manage, track and make an efficient use 
> of their numerous tags.

Please do read [2] and take a look at [3] with "filetags.py
--tag-gardening". 

> Many thanks,
> Martin

I don't want to spoil your tag-erotic but you should probably
check-out "Everything Is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger. He
claims that the best meta-data is the content/data itself. To sum it
up, I can imagine him saying something like "Stop adding tags, make
use of advanced methods to filter and re-find according to the
content". He has some really excellent points and the book is worth
reading it in any case. However, I still enjoy maintaining my
controlled vocabulary with tags - especially when working with files.

[1] http://karl-voit.at/tagstore/
[2] http://karl-voit.at/managing-digital-photographs/ + linked GitHub
    scripts
[3] https://github.com/novoid/filetags

-- 
mail|git|SVN|photos|postings|SMS|phonecalls|RSS|CSV|XML to Org-mode:
       > get Memacs from https://github.com/novoid/Memacs <

https://github.com/novoid/extract_pdf_annotations_to_orgmode + more on github

Re: Tags management strategies

[Martin Leduc]

On 16-05-16 03:59 PM, Samuel Wales wrote:
> i skip tags almost entirely in favor of regular expression search.  :)
>
Hi Samuel, thanks for your response. Using regular expression search is 
certainly a good approach to this problem and I would like to take some 
time to master this technique better. I suppose we could even do tag 
searching based on regexp :)

Re: Tags management strategies

[Samuel Wales]

one of the great things about the plain text format is that a word and
regular expression search will catch anything -- including stuff that
is semantic in org.

samuel

-- 
The Kafka Pandemic: http://thekafkapandemic.blogspot.com

The disease DOES progress.  MANY people have died from it.  And
ANYBODY can get it.

Denmark: free Karina Hansen NOW.

Re: Tags management strategies

[Martin Leduc]

On 05/17/2016 08:23 AM, Karl Voit wrote:
> David Weinberger
Hi Karl,

Thank you so much for these interesting resources. I've read your 
technique for tagging files and folders and must admit that it's quite 
impressing. I would love to implement such kind of a system one day 
along with my GTD set-up, but I'm unfortunately lacking time for such a 
project at the moment.

I found your suggestion of using file-specific tags very interesting 
because it simplifies a lot of things. For example, rather than using 
grouptags in a global list, I can use file-specific tags. That way each 
file can represent a specific context, with a group of tags associated 
with it. Used along with capture templates, this can become powerful, as 
I can press C-q and then TAB to display an ordered list of all tags 
related to that context.

Using file-specific tags allowed me to simplify my org-tag-alist to 5 
tags (HOME,WORK,MAIL,CALL,READ), which can be added to any file-specific 
list without any problems since, as you said, context-related lists of 
tags overlap rather vaguely.

David Weinberger's book seems interesting. This is in agreement with 
Samuel Wales suggestion (see the other response to my first post) to 
make an extensive use of regexp searches (I need to invest some time for 
this).

At first I thought I was asking a simple and naive question about tags. 
Thanks for opening this interesting Pandora's box.

Martin