(Archived) Import many tags

[skreisel 0]

Hi there.

Haven't found fruitful discussions on the topic, so I'll give it a try. I'd like to assign content (notes, etc.) predefined tags that were initially created as part of a thesaurus of "comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences" (for those of you part of the biomedical community - its MeSH). The list is clearly a bit ambitious as it contains over 25000 entries, but there are versions with a lot less (say hundreds of headings, i.e. potential tags). To guarantee consistency and make sure the tags are there when I need them in Evernote, I'd like to import the list on the fly (e.g. out of a text file) and have evernote extract the terms as tags. So's there a way to do just that?

Cheers

Stefan

[jefito 5,598]

Note that I know of, no. I'll try to think of a workaround, but short of doing some custom programming, I can't think of any. If you're on the Mac, maybe an AppleScript script would be feasible; I understand that that's a pretty approachable system.

[jbenson2 2,149]

Yes, there is a way to do it, but it will take quite a bit of effort to accomplish.

In my case, half of my 10K+ notes are web captures of political events stored in a notebook called Politics.

I maintain a special note that contains hundreds of previous tag searches.

For instance, how can I be sure that all the web captures that discuss Israel are tagged with Israel?

• notebook:Politics "Israel*" -tag:Israel

Then I highlight all the notes in the Note List (titles only) and use the Ctrl + Alt + T to tag them all in one shot with Israel.
One of my most commonly used tags is White House.

• notebook:Politics "White House*" -tag:"White House"

Obama can be more of a problem, because his name is written differently by reporters.

I search for:

• notebook:Politics "President Obama*" -tag:"Obama Barack"
  notebook:Politics "Barack Obama*" -tag:"Obama Barack"
  notebook:Politics "Obama administration" -tag:"Obama Barack"

Yes, it is tedious. After you import all the documents, knock off 50 tags a day. Just be sure to save the searches. You might have to add more documents in the future.

.

[jbenson2 2,149]

Without a doubt, my most difficult tag is the leader of Libya. The proper spelling depends on what country you live in.

notebook:Politics "Moammar Gaddafi" -tag:"Gaddafi Muammar"

notebook:Politics "Muammar Gaddafi" -tag:"Gaddafi Muammar"

notebook:Politics "Moammar Gadhafi" -tag:"Gaddafi Muammar"

notebook:Politics "Muammar el-Qaddafi" -tag:"Gaddafi Muammar"

notebook:Politics "Muammar al-Gaddafi" -tag:"Gaddafi Muammar"

Once I run these 5 searches over my 10,000 notes, I can be fairly confident that I have located most of the articles that contain the current Libya leader.

By the way, I try not to search for just the last name. Most articles might contain a person's last name in the title, but in almost all cases, the full name is mentioned in the body of the article.

[skreisel 0]

@jefito: What a pity - no Mac around!

@jbenson2: There's always that one feature missing in your favourite application...

It just strikes me that concise editing and adding of tags (including the use of more complex subject-specific dictionaries) - this is not solitary to Evernote (check out the excellent citation manager Zotero, where offline tagging is an equal hassle) - is something that seems underrated.

Hope there are more suggestions out there!

[jbenson2 2,149]

I had the same problem when I moved from FrontRange GoldMine to Evernote. I had tons of great stuff in GoldMine but all in a different structure than Evernote. My philosophy was to roll up my sleeves and fight through the transition. It was a mess and I know I lost a lot of stuff. But now I am on the other side. The open format of Evernote gives me more flexibility and hopefully no more database changes for a long time.

Good luck. I hope someone out there can offer some guidance on your requirement.

[skreisel 0]

Well there's one way to do it: create an empty note in *.enex and add a bunch of mytag.... That populates the tags. However, there's not way of adding tag-hierarchy - something very relevant to medical thesauri. Also tried hacking the *.exb database using the sqlitebrowser tool; to difficult for me at present, but may work...

[jefito 5,598]

Well there's one way to do it: create an empty note in *.enex and add a bunch of mytag.... That populates the tags. However, there's not way of adding tag-hierarchy - something very relevant to medical thesauri. Also tried hacking the *.exb database using the sqlitebrowser tool; to difficult for me at present, but may work...

Yeah, I knew that you could brute-force tag addition by creating a .enex file, and probably should have mentioned it, but usually when I suggest .enex solutions, I get looked at as if I have wo heads. Thanks for adding the tip, though.