Re: [O] Tags management strategies

[Karl Voit]

* Martin Leduc <address@hidden> 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

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