Hi A word of introduction: I came to Tiddly recently, during my search of a better tool to organize my content, which is usually text related to diverse areas. So this is what I'm after more than everything: effective ways to organize unstructured content. I basically feed very good about Tiddly for this aim.
And to the topic. I'm sure many of us are coming originally from a background of folders and files to organize their content. Than, one day you figure out: this piece of content is related to more than only one category. And my data model (directories tree) is not expressive enough to reflect this fact. Than tags step in - you can tag a piece of content by many tags. If it only belongs to one - than great, tag it with only one tag. And here we have a more expressive data model. Great. But (!) on the way we lost something important . Hierarchical structure hides from us the vast majority of our content, exposing on each step only a small part of relevant content. This follows one of our biggest natural cognitive limitations: *attention*. *Tags, in the traditional form,fail to do so*. You have all your tags at one big pile. The idea of tags cloud tries to handle this problem, by showing the most used tags bigger. But this is a statistical categorization, not conceptual So here is a claim: we need a way to powerfully categorize tags themselves as well. And, be able to select them by categories whenever needing to specify a tag (when searching by tag or when applying a tag) I'll suggest here an initial list of requirements for a feature that follows the thoughts above *- Be able to categorize existing tags, by applying other tags (already possible in Tiddly) [example: apply the tag "vehicle" on the tag "car"]* *- When applying a tag, be able to create a new tag under an existing tag [example: create the tag "subaru" under the tag "car" (that himself is tagged by vehicle). Later, we'll be able to apply also "Japanese products" on "subaru" but in the time of creation it will be probably apropriate to limit categorization to one parent tag]* * * *In two situations we need to specify tags, and this search for tags: when applying a tag, when filtering by a tag* *In this situation we need to be able to search for tags, exactly as we're searching for content. Namely: by textual search - i.e. auto complete (a plugin for this by Udo already exists) and by tags* *So if I want to search info about a car that I recently saw and don't remember the brand, I will type (or better be also able to use a GUI): tags:car [here a dropdown will appear with all tags that are themselves tagged by car, i.e. brands of cars] and I can now choose: only filter by the main category - car, or continue and choose a subtag: Subaru. * * * *Whenever a Tidler is tagged by a tag, it will be automatically tagged also by all parent tags. So when tagging a tiddler by Subaru, it'll be automatically tagged also by "car" and by "Japanese product". (This can be implemented at the time of tagging, or at the time of retrieval. Should be transparent to the user.) * * * Some more general thoughts: Personally I feel that rarely more than 2 levels of hierarchy will be needed. Maybe 3. But this 2-3 level are absolutely needed. I felt this need many times since I started to insert content into my Tiddly some week ago My guess is that many may not feel strongly the need for the above, because they don't use so much tags. However, in my opinion, there is a great chance, that those people would use much more tags, IF they had an efficient way to order and retrieve them. And more tags used is more captured meaning, and better abilities of retrieval. I.e. more chances that you'll actually use what you wrote. Hey guys, I hope for a positive resonance, for this post of mine. I feel this is a key point, go ahead and share you thoughts. Dani P.S Generally I'm a web developer, and even if more server side oriented, I have some experience also with JS and JQuery. If my excitement with Tiddlly will continue to be at high level it currently is, there is a good chance that I'll jump one day into the wagon of Tiddly development. I'm not sure however how soon my time will allow this So for now I'm throwing this idea here into the group, in order for it to start getting feedback and resonating with other peoples minds. I'll for sure be very glad if someone likes it enough to implement -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en.
