Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

Re:Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags” by culi on Monday January 24, 2022 @04:44PM (#30064478)

You could hypothetically collapse the two though. You can have tags and could use those to automatically generate efficient organization structures.

For example, say you have the following datums with the following tags

  apple:     plant, Rosaceae, tree, fruit
  peach:     plant, Rosaceae, tree, fruit
  rose:      plant, Rosaceae, shrub, flower
  dandelion: plant, Asteraceae, herb, flower
  carrot:    plant, Apiaceae, herb, root
  pig:       animal, Suidae

You can then try to generate a folder structures that optimizes certain parameters like keeping the average number of children to not too far away from ~6 and/or minimizing the depth of the repo structure or whatever. Depending on how you wanna optimize it, you could end up with a number of structures such as:

  root
  - plant
    - tree
      - apple
      - peach
    - herb
      - dandelion
      - carrot
    - rose
  - animals
    - pig

  root
  - Rosaceae
    - apple
    - peach
    - rose
  - animal
    - pig
  - other
    - dandelion
    - carrot

You can use your imagination to think of better structures or optimization problems, but you get the basic point. We can have tags be our primary classification method and have the organizational structure be an outcome of that.

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Re:Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags” by pphysch on Monday January 24, 2022 @04:59PM (#30064649)

I like this approach: building a simple folder interface on top of a more flexible tag system, which can always be accessed when necessary. I think many systems would benefit from it.

There are tradeoffs, though: a fair bit of overhead for each heavily nested item. And you would want some support for ensuring the integrity of the hierarchies (i.e. someone accidentally removes "tree" from the tag set of "apple").

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Re:Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags” by bo1024 on Monday January 24, 2022 @06:50PM (#30065862)

I implemented this for my email. Each email can have any number of tags. Each tag can have a directory hierarchy.

So for instance an email can be tagged fun/ski, social/facebook/marketplace, money/receipts.

If you open the social/facebook/marketplace “folder” you’ll see the email, but also if you open the money/receipts “folder”. You could also see it in the intersection of the social tag and the fun/ski tag, etc.

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Re:Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags” by throwaway_Aef8 on Monday January 24, 2022 @05:38PM (#30065063)

maybe on top of your idea ensure there's a graph feature like at the top right of https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Index

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Re:Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags” by githubalphapapa on Monday January 24, 2022 @05:25PM (#30064889)

Here's a library for writing such classification systems in Emacs Lisp: https://github.com/alphapapa/taxy.el

Especially, see this example: https://github.com/alphapapa/taxy.el#sporty-understanding-co...

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