Re: [O] Thesauri to manage tags ("Tag taxonomies") -- feature request

[Karl Voit]

* John Tait <address@hidden> wrote:
> Dear all

Hi!

> Some time ago I floated a "tag hierarchy" idea for org-mode. It didn't
> gain much interest (through I received some very kind replies).
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2011-03/msg01393.html

Wow, cool idea and I totally agree regarding the usefulness of this
featurewish.

sidemark: I'm kinda biased about tags, hierarchies, controlled
vocabularies, personal information management with files, ... since
these are things I do research with [1].

> The problem I'm trying to solve is that, in big publishing projects,
> the number of tags can grow and might eventually need to be managed
> outside org-mode. (I'm already keeping lists of my tags inside
> org-mode tables.)
>
> What I would love to do is build a simple taxonomy of tags from a
> controlled vocabulary -- that I can manage entirely inside org-mode.

You do not need that many tags to provide meaningful examples that
justify this feature. Take for example following tags I am using:

location based tags:
* Graz (the city where I live)
* TUGraz (where I work)
* flat (where I actually do work too :-)
* out-of-town
* parents (not in Graz)

action based tags:
* fitness
* nonComputer
* communication
* errands

With your proposed feature I could manage to express following
dependencies:

    Graz > TUGraz            (TUGraz is in Graz)
    Graz > flat              (my flat is in Graz)

So when I create an agenda view with «Graz» I might as well see
entries which are tagged with «TUGraz» since this is a subset of
«Graz».

    out-of-town | Graz       (out-of-town is not in Graz)

I am not sure if this OR condition is of any use here.

    out-of-town > parents    (my parents are out-of-town)

Agenda views related to out-of-town should include things I have to
manage at my parents place.
    
    nonComputer > fitness    (doing sports is not computer related)

I do not count Wii games as sports :-) Agenda views related to
nonComputer stuff should also list fitness items as well.

    Graz > errands           (I usually buy stuff in town)

    fitness ! flat           (I never do actual sport in my flat)

Is there a need for explicit negation?


Looking forward to a mechanism to define (sub)sets of tags in order
to simplify queries matching tags. Because this is what I do think
it possibly means: «C-c a m +Graz|+flat» does provide the combined
sets of «Graz» and «flat» for the purpose of agenda views.

(I am not using (filtered) export yet)

  1. http://tagstore.org
-- 
Karl Voit