JCR usage scenaria - howto organize content

[Günther Schmidt]

Hi,

this question isn't specifically Jackrabbit related but more on how to 
use your JCR, ie. how to organize your data within it.

I have most of my data now in Jackrabbit now. With data I mean mostly 
emails and documents (PDFs, docs, images, etc, calendar and work flow 
will follow later).

The next step for me is to organize it. Ordering the data merely on a 
hierarchical basis, ie. "folders" seems wasteful, I could have used a 
file system for that and all I would have gained by using a JCR would be 
versioning and automatic full text indexing.

I want to be able to group related content (documents and emails at the 
moment) semantically together. At first I had considered using 
references to "link" related data but a) it seems difficult to implement 
and b) most of what I read suggests not to use them, or use them sparsely.

So now I'm thinking about using tags instead, ie. add a multivalued 
string field and patch it onto an email node or a file node and tag it. 
This way an email could belong to more than category. Would it be better 
to create a "taggable" mixin for this instead of a plain property?

Now the tagging approach of course has some drawbacks too depending on 
how fine or coarse grained I will eventually use it. If I use it too 
excessively by slapping too many tags onto a node item or by using too 
many different tags it will become confusing very soon.

At the the end of the day when I need to take care of business I want an 
easy way to have all the relevant data about a case in one place, is the 
tagging approach a feasible way to go?

Günther