(Archived) What's the point of hierarchical tags?

[dl__ 0]

The evernote 3 Beta allows you to move a tag to be a sub-tag of another tag. However, the tags don't seem to behave as if they were related except in the way they are presented in the Tags list.

I like the idea of hierarchical tags but I would expect notes tagged by a subtag to also be tagged by the parent tag. For example, I might have tags like this:

....Work

........Project 1

........Project 2

If I make a note related to project 1 I'd like to associate the note with the Project 1 but have the note appear if I view the tag Work. Doesn't that make sense?

Also I think sub tags should live in their own name space so I could reuse tag names as subtags of other tags. That would allow something like:

....Project 1

........Design

........Test

....Project 2

........Design

........Test

So if I click on Design (under Project 2) I see design notes for project 2 but not Design notes for Project 1 and not notes tagged by Project 2.

If I click on Project 2 I see notes tagged by Project 2, notes tagged by Design under Project 2 and notes tagged by test under Project 2.

Is this planned for Evernote 3? Or is it there but I'm using it wrong?

Without features like this I see little use for being able to have tags under other tags.

Thanks

[engberg 89]

You're correct that tag hierarchies are organizational, not semantic. This allows you to organize your tags so that you don't have to see a flat list of hundreds of tags at a time ... you can close the tags that you're not using at the current time. If you have 500 tags, you can organize them into trees that you can collapse for ease of navigation.

Putting a tag under other tag doesn't imply a relationship between their tagged notes, however. If I tag 8 notes with "Personal" and 5 notes with "Cooking" and then I move "Cooking" under "Personal", that doesn't mean that all 5 of my "Cooking" notes have been tagged with "Personal". Tags are only assigned to a note if you explicitly assign them to that note.

[ThomasStraten 0]

Dear dl__

You are right. And everything you say is working beautifully in the previous version of EN (namely EN 2.2.1) that is still downloadable from the evernote site.

I suggest you try it, it goes beyond imagination. You may wish to look at a very good article from one of the Power users of that version at:

http://gtdwannabe.com/2006/04/using-eve ... -research/

and please note that the Essay is at his new server adress at:

http://gtdwannabe.com/essays/usingENforResearch.htm

Now this issue (no real hierarchical organization in the tags) has been the core of many discussions, and the staff promised that it could make it to EN 3.

We have to wait and see.

Dengberg's first declaration is stating that, effectively, EN3 differs completely from EN2. The tag pane is no more a "real" hierarchy tree but a kinda long list of keywords with indents and the ability to show/hide the so-called children. And that is it.

And it is effectively of very little use for serious work... But, and here come the POSITIVE, the kind of organisation EN3 show now CAN BE easily changed into a nested tree with all its functionality. So it is still possible for the team to keep their promises.

If they change their code in SQLite (hopefully 2 cause 3 is problematic and faulty), they can rebuild your database from the existing poor EN3 to the good EN2 with not many efforts. And preserve all your data...and regain the whole organizational power, inclusive the multi selection, the intersection panel etc...

I think, it is only a wild guess, that the choice they are making for the moment is due to the Mobile Phone (and Iphone) access and interaction, plus the fact that more code is needed in those two.

One possible solution is to implement again the whole stuf for the Desktop and the WEB versions, and keep it simplified for the Mobile and Iphone. In fact, I think most of people will use the mobility of portables mostly for clipping... not for real work of organizing, searching, deep interaction with the program and the data. They are too slow anyway and not very practical.

And then, on any computer (desktop or WEB system), work seriously, organize what they clipped, select with deep searches, print their results, etc...

This could be an interesting scenario and a good way to have the best of both worlds.

Now about the second point Dengberg mentions,

If I tag 8 notes with "Personal" and 5 notes with "Cooking" and then I move "Cooking" under "Personal", that doesn't mean that all 5 of my "Cooking" notes have been tagged with "Personal". Tags are only assigned to a note if you explicitly assign them to that note.

That is true for EN3 so far as it explains it in the first part of his posting.

BUT IN EN 2, moving "Cooking" under "Personal" and double-clicking on "Personal" would get the Personal notes and the Cooking notes, just because of the RELATIONSHIP (Parent-Child) that will be in action. And this is the whole point you, dear dl__, are hoping for.

We just have to wait and see. As I said, I see no problem to transform the EN3 behavior into the EN2's. It is a matter of creating the nested tree table, change the code (implementing the nested tree functionality) and it is about all. All this because the NOTES and their tags are absolutely OUT of that table. The nested tree table is only used for the organization, movement, deletions, queries (to preselect notes)...

And that is why your data is absolutely safe and will be perfectly transported from EN Beta 3 to EN Beta 3.1 (or 3.2).

This is theoretically correct. It can be easily demonstrated. But, as I also said, there might be some considerations (SQLite, Portable systems (Mobile, Iphone)) that could make it harder. In that case, my suggestion of DESKTOP/WEB implementation and an lighter MOBILE (Iphone) system could still be valid.

We all experience differences between desktop or WEB systems and what we can get on mobiles, I can look at a Word document but I cannot edit it (Symbian needs a special program to let you do that, Iphone has no way to this day). We don't ask our Mobile devices to be our Desktop system!!!

So clipping (links and perhaps one day, pages)), adding some quick notes, pictures or voice to EN3 is worth it. Organize and work with this data at home with the DESKTOP, or other computer with the WEB version would be simply fantastic.

Hope it helps.

Tom

[dl__ 0]

Well, I really hope it gets added to Evernote 3 - especially if it was in Evernote 2.

I don't want to use Evernote 2 because I really want the online syncing of Evernote 3 but if I don't have hierarchical tags then all my notes are a flat list and that's really not very organized. Perhaps the place for evernote in a larger organizing scheme is just the temporary miscellaneous place where notes sit until being brought into some other repository that allows for greater organization.

If the only reason for EN3 tag hierarchy is to collapse long tag lists they could just have an automatic folding based on alphabetical order. It really makes no sense to me to drag "Cooking" under "Personal" unless "Cooking" was a specialization of "Personal" and that notes about "Cooking" were also notes about "Personal"

Also, the single namespace seems like a real hinderance. Like in my example, if I have design notes for project A and I want to keep them separate from Design notes for project B, without using the hierarchy I have to include ALL the organization in each tag. So design notes for project A need to be tagged ProjectA_Design and ProjectB_Design.

Maybe I need to think differently about this stuff - I know that tags are not typically hierarchical. They're not in Flickr or Delicious for example, but data often IS hierarchical and Evernote does not provide any way to capture this structure.

If tags will not be hierarchical, then I think Evernote should do 2 things:

1) Not allow me to make them hierarchical in the tag lists - it suggests a structure that doesn't actually exist. Use some automatic folding such as alphabetical list - or a search as you type mechanism for finding tags such as searching in iTunes.

2) Provide some alternate way of capturing hierarchy or parent/child relationships between notes such as Winorganizer or Treepad does.

So far though, except for this issue (which is kind of a biggie for me) I'm really liking Evernote 3

[wmmiller 0]

I don't want to use Evernote 2 because I really want the online syncing of Evernote 3 but if I don't have hierarchical tags then all my notes are a flat list and that's really not very organized.

The fact that the notes are in a flat list does not make them "unorganized;" the organization is in the indexing, not in the representation of the data. A relational database typically just represents the data as a bunch of two-dimensional arrays of data items. The structure is in the way they are accessed, using values from one table to index into another, etc., and that's supplied by the query. Similarly, in Evernote, the organization comes from the way the tags are used, not from the way the data or the tags are themselves structured.

Also, the single namespace seems like a real hinderance. Like in my example, if I have design notes for project A and I want to keep them separate from Design notes for project B, without using the hierarchy I have to include ALL the organization in each tag. So design notes for project A need to be tagged ProjectA_Design and ProjectB_Design.

No, I don't think that's what you want to do. Instead of having

    ProjectA
        Design
        Implementation
        Testing
    ProjectB
        Design
        Implementation
        Testing
    ProjectC
        ...

or the flattened version you suggested,

    ProjA_Design
    ProjA_Implementation
    ProjA_Testing
    ProjB_Design
    ...

what you want is a simple list of all the distinct tags which are then used and queried in a structured fashion:

    Design
    Implementation
    Testing
    ProjectA
    ProjectB
    ProjectC
    ...

Then for all of ProjectA's testing notes, you assign the two tags, ProjectA and Testing. Similarly, for ProjectB's testing notes, you'd assign ProjectB and Testing. If you want to see ProjectB's testing notes, you just select both the ProjectB and Testing tags as your query, and you have the notes you want. This pattern also makes it easy to slice things differently: if you want, for some reason, to see all the testing notes across all your projects, just query on the Testing tag.

This also significantly reduces the total number of tags involved; each new project adds only one tag to the list rather than three (flattened) or four (hierarchical), as you're not duplicating the Design, Implementation, and Testing tags for each new project.

(This also suggests the use for the "nesting" feature of the tag display to clarify and organize the visual presentation of the tags:

    Projects
        A
        B
        C
    Phases
        Design
        Implementation
        Testing

In this case, the non-leaf tags would never be assigned to notes because they have no meaning in relationship to the notes, they are just meta-information about the tags themselves. That's not necessarily true; with Personal and Cooking, for instance, it would make sense to assign both Personal and Cooking to a given note as well as using Personal as a visual aggregator in the list of tags.)

[JohnHicks 0]

Agree, I use tree-structured tags (categories) in EN2.

Category properties too. Example: I add my GTD:Dropped category to a note and automatically remove (according to category properties) categories GTD:Next and GTD:Today and so on.

But that's not the point, for me. Let's step back for a larger view.

I write software too, for twenty five years. We don't always know what our users love in our software. Our users themselves don't always know. Until this beta, I didn't know exactly what made Evernote 2 work so well for me. Like the song: Don't know what we have 'til it's gone.

Evernote: Extensible

Evernote 2 lets me (with help from the user community) write some of my own functionality into Evernote, instead of visiting this forum to lobby an overbooked development team (is there any other kind?).

Evernote 2 appends the user community to the development team. Don't lose that in Evernote 3. Let the user community experiment for you, scout for you, surprise you, surprise themselves, and lead the way.

My top request for Evernote 3, then: Give the user community the tools to take Evernote past anything you have yet imagined...

Category properties (rules, scripts), for example.

Meanwhile, thank you.

[ThomasStraten 0]

I agree with wmmiller.

But it has a small problem. Most people do not "know" or understand how to organize "at best" their database because they don't have an analytic or programatic knowledge as background.

So the way EN 2.2.1 worked, giving the possibility to have tags repeated (same name) in different places is easier to grasp.

And there is less "selection clicks" to make in order to obtain their desired results.

EN 2 was(is) for power users AND for beginners, and I think that was(is) the beauty of it.

Tom

[ThomasStraten 0]

Sorry

In the case of:

Projects

A

B

C

Phases

Design

Implementation

Testing

You will have zip if you click on Projects (double-clicking neither) and Phases in EN3, while EN2 would give all results!!!

It only works in EN3 in case of:

Design

Implementation

Testing

ProjectA

ProjectB

ProjectC

...

with clicks on Design, Implementation,Testing, Project A, Project B, Project C (fewwwwww!!!! lots of clicks if they are far apart!!!)

Tom

[wmmiller 0]

Sorry

In the case of:

Projects

A

B

C

Phases

Design

Implementation

Testing

You will have zip if you click on Projects (double-clicking neither) and Phases in EN3, while EN2 would give all results!!!

Well, that makes sense to me; there are no notes dealing with "Projects" or "Phases" as concepts, only notes dealing with the design phase of project A or the testing phase of Project B, etc.

It only works in EN3 in case of:

Design

Implementation

Testing

ProjectA

ProjectB

ProjectC

...

with clicks on Design, Implementation,Testing, Project A, Project B, Project C (fewwwwww!!!! lots of clicks if they are far apart!!!)

No, if the usage of the tags is for every note to have both a "project" tag and a "phase" tag, it will be enough to select all the projects or (not and) all the phases, and that will give you all phases of all projects. And that's the idea of aggregating all the project tags under "Projects" and all the phase tags under "Phases," so they won't be far apart -- they'll be a contiguous list, so you can click on the first and do a shift-click on the last and select them all with two clicks.

[ThomasStraten 0]

I see your point.

It is perhaps a matter of personal preferences.

In my case, having to deal with Philosophy and some of its subbranches, with books, articles, notes, plus authors in mixed fields like sociology, linguistics, neurosciences and a whole lot of very hierarchic data and also some completely unrelated (expenses, phone calls (but about a philosopher and an idea for instance) I do prefed the ease of use of EN 2.

What do I have in Books, To Read... Or a listing of all my books, or my writings about an author (comments, quotes, critiques, explanation, sudden ideas, etc...)

It is easier for me, I found it unique and am not willing to give it up. Specially because it couldn't be easily transported to EN 3

In another program, the database is:

New Energies

...solar

...eolic

etc..

I found very frustrating not to be able to have all notes of all energies by clicking only on the New Energies tag.

I am unable to make a report on a tag Introduction plus the New Energies. Instead, I have to make separate reports because it is hard to manage in EN3 (try to make so many multiple selections on a mobile!!!)

If you have power, why limit it instead of enjoying it?

Tom

[wmmiller 0]

I see your point.

And I see yours as well. I can well believe that in many cases it would be much more convenient (and, perhaps, intuitive, although what is intuitive to one person is often inpenetrably confusing to another) to have semantically hierarchical tags. My only observation was that where you have a shallow and fairly regular conceptual hierarchy, it's not too hard to get what you want even with non-hierarchical tags.

[ThomasStraten 0]

You are absolutely right.

But I am beginning to be very interested by the aplication of Hierarchical Tag Trees versus our normal folder-like hierarchy PLUS the use of tags (or keywords) as in most systems.

It could be a complete new way (and I feel very promising) to data organization. They might be some theoretical advantages. It would be interesting to give it a little thought.

Regards

Tom

[dl__ 0]

Thanks for the in-depth discussion. Sounds like you and I just want to use the product differently. I'll try to explain how I think your strategy falls short for me.

in Evernote, the organization comes from the way the tags are used, not from the way the data or the tags are themselves structured.

True, but only because a tag hierarchy is not offered as an alternative as it was in EN2. If the tag hierarchy was offered, you could use a flat list and I could use the hierarchy.

The way you describe is error prone and, for me at least, clumsy. You suggest

what you want is a simple list of all the distinct tags which are then used and queried in a structured fashion:

    Design
    Implementation
    Testing
    ProjectA
    ProjectB
    ProjectC
    ...

Then for all of ProjectA's testing notes, you assign the two tags, ProjectA and Testing. Similarly, for ProjectB's testing notes, you'd assign ProjectB and Testing.

And that's the problem. I need to remember my tagging strategy and implement it manually, for each note, rather than establish it in the hierarchy and have it handled automatically.

Invariably, for some notes I will tag it Testing and not ProjectA or the reverse, because I'm thinking about Testing, or ProjectA and not how I decided some time ago I would structure my tags.

Also, from my experience with other hierarchical note taking programs I'd be lucky to get away with one level of grouping. Under ProjectA I might have "UI", "DB", "Messaging" while ProjectB doesn't have a UI but does have "DB" and "Services" sections that have design, testing and documentation notes.

How do I record what the structure is in evernote so that I don't have to remember my tagging structure. As far as I can see I can't record it (except as a note I guess). I can't use the hierarchy because "Testing" and "UI" exist only in one place.

It would be far easier to describe my tagging structure to evernote and let IT remember it and then, when I want to make a note about testing in ProjectA, I expand the ProjectA tags and I'm reminded of what tags I defined as relevant and I just drag one single tag and all the rest of the structure comes for free.

Everyone is happy - I get my rich structure, others that don't need it have their flat structure.

[crispinb 8]

And that's the problem. I need to remember my tagging strategy and implement it manually, for each note, rather than establish it in the hierarchy and have it handled automatically.

I'm a relative newcomer to Evernote, but I have used it pretty intensively for the past few weeks and you've highlighted the biggest problem I've found. I've tried a few different means of organising my tags, but I find the cognitive load of remembering to apply a hierarchical scheme merely by convention very error-prone. It has often resulting in me missing notes when searching for a tag conjunction, because I had forgotten to apply a particular tag.

I would like to know whether or not hierarchical tags are being considered for the future, as if so I might use a temporary scheme in preparation. If not (ie. if Evernote's tagging is to stay as is ) I suspect it best to keep things simple, with a combination of conceptually flat tagging and judicious use of search.

Is anyone reading this managing to keep a fairly complex set of notes in good order, without too much tagging/admin friction, with Evernote 3? Any suggestions?

[dl__ 0]

I'm a relative newcomer to Evernote, but I have used it pretty intensively for the past few weeks and you've highlighted the biggest problem I've found. I've tried a few different means of organising my tags, but I find the cognitive load of remembering to apply a hierarchical scheme merely by convention very error-prone. It has often resulting in me missing notes when searching for a tag conjunction, because I had forgotten to apply a particular tag.

To me this stands in the way of evernote delivering the knockout punch. I cannot call off the search for the perfect note taking application and uninstall my other programs because I cannot reasonably express a hierarchy in EN3.

For me, EN3 is great for notes of a linear nature. I use it a lot for journal kinds of notes. As a lab notebook to keep track of day-to-day progress. Or as a collection of interesting web pages or web snippets. This tends to be transitory data, most of which is unlikely to be looked at again after a few days. It's for data like that which doesn't have much inherent structure.

I still find myself taking information from evernote, once I understand the info's place in my note universe and moving it into another program that allows hierarchy and arbitrary links between data.

It's got so much right with it, it just needs to lose this google-ish "search is all you need". It's not all I need. My data has structure but I can't depend on remembering it and EN3 won't yet let me capture it.

Like you, I'd like to hear of additional tagging strategies because, there just might be one that would do it for me.

[keenerguy 16]

I think that you have to look at this in a different perspective with EN3.

Instead of creating a tag for Project 1, create a specific notebook for it. Then use the tags as needed. You don't need to recreate the tags and your tag list can stay smaller. Additionally, since EN3 greys out tags that aren't being used when you select a notebook, it is easy to identify the necessary tags.

It's not perfect, but I think given the framework, it works well.

[crispinb 8]

I think that you have to look at this in a different perspective with EN3.

Instead of creating a tag for Project 1, create a specific notebook for it. Then use the tags as needed. You don't need to recreate the tags and your tag list can stay smaller. Additionally, since EN3 greys out tags that aren't being used when you select a notebook, it is easy to identify the necessary tags.

It's not perfect, but I think given the framework, it works well.

I do use different notebooks, but one-per-project wouldn't work for me, since I have too many small projects that naturally fall together into a small number of larger categories. I use notebooks for the latter.

One real problem with the use of multiple notebooks is that it makes it a lottery which notebook a capture ends up in. You have to remember which notebook you last selected. Perhaps that's an issue for a different thread.

I seem to be gradually narrowing to the strategy of using a small group of tags, and avoiding the pseudo-hierarchy aspect altogether. I use a few high-level tags for visual organisation of the others, but never actually apply them to notes. It seems to be working reasonably well.