6 ms·

If only life was that simple that it could be enclosed into series of two digits categories. The problem with such strongly hierarchical system is that it fail

If only life was that simple that it could be enclosed into series of two digits categories. The problem with such strongly hierarchical system is that it fails if there is some document, note, picture, etc. that would be useful to keep in multiple locations. Obviously we can introduce links between objects, but I believe tags are more comfortable to use. Hierarchical system, folders are artifacts of the physical world in which a single object, tool, pipe, screw, book cannot be in two places at the same time. In the abstract world of computers a note about new game could be in #games, #fun, #to-check, #interesting-ideas, #great-graphics, etc.

MarceColl 3y ago
I think that's the whole point of this system, when you have infinite tags it's impossible to maintain a correct taxonomy, you add #great-graphics to this game, but now you have to backfill it to all other games, or in the future you may miss them. They created this so the hierarchy is unambiguous (as much as possible), you want a document, you are two steps away from it in an easy to find way. tag systems have far too much maintenance and adding a new tag is almost impossible to do exhaustively so you have a lot of partial tags.
- cjbprime 3y ago
  > you want a document, you are two steps away from it in an easy to find way This isn't a response to the parent commenter's point, right? They were describing how many projects have items where a resource easily fits within the scope of N different categories, at which point they become max N steps away from it, not max 2 steps.
  - horsawlarway 3y ago
    Two thoughts: 1. This is much, much less likely with the enforced limits on categorization in the post. 2. No - you are still 2 steps away. Make a choice about where that item lives. If it's shared across many categories, maybe you really need a distinct category like "Ambiguous" or "Shared"
    - albedoa 3y ago
      > No - you are still 2 steps away. Make a choice about where that item lives. You misunderstand. The max N steps are at the point of recall, not categorization decision.
- majkinetor 3y ago
  #great-graphichs problem is not something category based system will solve either, as you have the same problem. Nothing will, to be honest, maybe AI eventually and even it can't do it in all the things. > you want a document, you are two steps away from it in an easy to find way This is not how people work in general. This kind of thing might be OK for institution for taxonomy like collections.
- chaxor 3y ago
  This is a great point about tag maintenance *if you have to make the tags yourself*. However, if you have a simple ML system that you can run to categorize your files and pull out good single word descriptors that have a large explained variance over your files, you can run this and check the tags that are constructed. I think there's a good way forward that uses typical hierarchical Johnny.Decimal filesystems, with an overlay filesystem with tags that can update the tags every so often based on the content in the files. Obviously letting the user have a hand in this via a TUI/gui would be helpful for choosing tags for which they're comfortable. Unfortunately I haven't settled on a good filesystem with tags (how to do this with ZFS?) or how to interact with it as a network filesystem served to many different OS (cifs with tags?).
  - esperent 3y ago
    > However, if you have a simple ML system Or the old-school method, a community of people with tagging powers and a few moderators to do sanity checks.
  - MarceColl 3y ago
    It doesn't seem to me like a simple ML system, it needs to be able to extract tags from all kinds of filetypes (video, games, images, assets, text, ...), at a decent speed and then it has to assign tags to what you would also assign, because if it doesn't do that then it's even worse, because you can never find anything as your mapping and the ML mapping would not be the same.
bachmeier 3y ago
Your argument seems to come up a fair amount in these discussions. In the end, you have to deal with storage of many items, and you can either browse or search. The browse approach requires you to know where you'll be browsing in the future. The searching approach requires you to know what to search for. No system is going to deliver all relevant documents, but you can do a good enough job with a hierarchical system plus search.
- hotsauceror 3y ago
  I think this is exactly right, and it is a facet of the same discoverability issues that crop up when people talk about GUI vs CLI - one is more useful when you're discovering, and one when you are searching. Tags are really set-based search operations like a SQL query, but the 'primary key' is the filename, and if you knew that you'd just search for it. You're rarely going to have a tag or attribute that can pinpoint a single document.
cnity 3y ago
Gödel's incompleteness theorems strike again.
jasode 3y ago
>Hierarchical system, folders are artifacts of the physical world in which a single object, tool, pipe, screw, book cannot be in two places at the same time. Many think hierarchies come from limits in the physical world but that's not what's happening. Yes, that's some of the cause but does not explain all of it. The deeper rooted reason is that hierarchies are a convenience to aid the human mind. Even without any limitations of physical shelves, the brain likes to: - notice the relationships from the general-to-specific and navigate them with spatial cues of dirs parent-->child-->grandchild-->etc - group related items together -- using spatial cues of moving file icons into a file system folder The world the the blog essay is working in is the os file system. The various files have to be put somewhere on the file system. Since putting hundreds/thousands of files into a single flat folder is useless, one creates some child subfolders to organize it it in some way. The tagging system assumes a different mechanism (e.g. a separate "database" of tags which filesystems like Microsoft NTFS and Linux ext4 do not have natively.) This happens above the native filesystem. (Incidentally, by placing a file into a subfolder, the name of that folder and the names of parent folders above it act as an "implied set of tags" for free.) That said, both hierarchical folders and tags solve different needs. Also, hierarchies simulate/approximate "tags" by "virtual folders" and 1-to-n softlinks. Likewise, tagging can simulate "hierarchies" via compound-multi-word-tags.
horsawlarway 3y ago
Personally - I've come to the absolute opposite opinion. To be overly blunt: "Tags fucking suck." They are literally the worst possible way to store and organize your information, and they are only useful when you just want a random sampling of a category - not a specific document or piece of information. Ex: Great for social media or looking at old photos or just playing a song from a genre you like, bad (fucking terrible) for organization and structure. --- Hierarchical structures have downsides, but the exact thing you complain about (artifacts of the physical world) is exactly their strength... You have a body that is adapted to the physical world - routing and navigation through a series of ordered steps is a VERY well developed human skill. We are primed to be able to remember things like: - Go left at the tree, - Straight until you hit road - Right at the road - continue until you hit a red house with a big garden - etc... That skill set maps directly into the hierarchical system of folder: - Find the "documents" folder on the desktop - scroll down to "my super sweet project" - open that folder - Find the "icons" folder - open it and double click "exactly_the_thing_you_wanted.jpg" ------ You can absolutely still make horrible, unorganized messes - but if done well (ex: this article is actually a fairly good system) it's a much, much better system than tags.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I’ve thought a bit about tags++, that is adding some logical and not-so-logical features to them. For instance there are ideas from OWL where you could define a category instead of other categories and their attributes, for instance tag D could be the union of tag A and tag B and the complement of tag C. Implication is also useful both as a way to implement subclassing but also containment relationships. For instance on Danbooru a character that has several forms would have the various forms of the character imply that character and the character would imply the media property that the character comes from. I am looking at what a tagging system looks like in the transformer age and one key idea is a kind of three value logic around tags which can be in a “positive”, “indeterminant” and “negative” state. If you are training a machine learning system to auto tag you will need (1) a number of examples where a tag does not apply (the tag not being applied is not evidence that the tag doesn’t apply, poor coverage of negative examples is one reason why YouTube recommendation is worse than TikTok) and (2) to deal with cases where the ML model tags something incorrectly. If the model tagging something puts it in an indeterminant polarity and that result can later be switched to negative or positive that is a great way to manage the situation.
II2II 3y ago
The article points out that it is too easy to create duplicate files. Part of that ties into what you're talking about. Part of that deals with how people deal with files (e.g. few people use versioning outside of software development). The article is suggesting that a strong hierarchical system will help to avoid that problem. Of course the other problem with tags is management. Placing something into multiple relevant categories involves more effort. Failing to place something into a relevant category makes it harder to find since you are now dealing with either a flat file namespace (worse yet, a disorganized one) or a flat tag namespace. In theory, some of this can be handled by letting someone else handle the tags (e.g. the creator, the publisher, or the seller), but that has its own problems since there is frequently a conflict of interest (e.g. irrelevant tags are applied to increase the visibility of a product). At the end of the day, we have to accept there is no perfect system of categorization. Some will prefer hierarchies. Some will prefer tags. From the tone of the article, it is clear that they prefer hierarchies.
- jen729w 3y ago
  > At the end of the day, we have to accept there is no perfect system of categorization. Some will prefer hierarchies. Some will prefer tags. From the tone of the article, it is clear that they prefer hierarchies. I’m the Johnny who wrote Johnny.Decimal and this is basically it. The OP clearly isn’t one of the people for whom finding JD is a massive mental relief. I know those people exist: they write and tell me. Others find the idea baffling. Stupid, even. That’s fine. If this helps you, enjoy it. If it doesn’t, use something else.
  - dxs 3y ago
    Thank you. "If this helps you, enjoy it. If it doesn’t, use something else." is a sane, humble, and adult attitude. You have my respect.
phailhaus 3y ago
Workflowy [1] solves this problem by supporting mirrored nodes as well as tags. [1] https://workflowy.com/ https://workflowy.com/
edpichler 3y ago
I solved this problem with hard links. I became fan of Hierarchical systems, it just works.
dclowd9901 3y ago
While I haven’t gone so far as to attribute a numbering system to my organization, I have done well at organizing things into red-line distinctive categories. The idea is to create categories that _cannot_ overlap. If there’s any commonality between them that’s not useless, they need to be grouped at a higher level. As an example, if you’re organizing your toolbox, you don’t mark a drawer “hand tools” because it’s a useless categorization. You mark one “socket tools” which will include everything from the sockets and wrenches themselves to adapters that connect a socket to an impact wrench (but an impact wrench does not go in there because it is not exclusively a socket tool). If it really does come down to something that may really fit in two categories (hey, there’s always exceptions), you put your mindset in the place of yourself when you want to look it up: what’s the most common situation in which you’ll be looking this thing up?
- frabtanium 3y ago
  This is the crux of it right here. You need to decide up front, thoughtfully and carefully - where you are going to put something. Just like in the physical world. Then you need to adjust and adapt it as you go. All the benefit comes downstream from those small additions to the workflow when you go to save something digitally.
floren 3y ago
I built a hierarchical note-keeping system for myself and have been intending to add tags to it, but I've never gotten around to it -- because the hierarchy is generally "good enough" after I added two features: linking, and grep. Grep is self-explanatory. Linking works like hard links in Unix, where the same note appears as a child of multiple different parents (added a command to find "orphans" in case you unlink it from everywhere). At this point I might not even bother adding tags.
- jkubicek 3y ago
  > Linking works like hard links in Unix, where the same note appears as a child of multiple different parents (added a command to find "orphans" in case you unlink it from everywhere). > At this point I might not even bother adding tags. What you described with hard links is exactly how I use tags, so that would satisfy my need for tags as an organizational tool.
Imnimo 3y ago
But step 2 is to just "Make sure the buckets are unambiguously different."! How hard could that be? \s
syntheweave 3y ago
I spent some time studying the world of professional home organization(as seen on Youtube) and the core concepts always come down to these: * Allocate space up front in the form of containers * Position containers around workspaces * Use containers appropriate to the type of object and its use(e.g. "rounds in rounds" - put round bottles on turntable racks so you can spin to access) * Duplicate objects you need to use in multiple locations, e.g. scissors for the kitchen and for the office * Label spaces where things belong And the key thing to it is that this isn't a hard rule like always organizing hierarchically or always labelling. The hierarchy helps compress space(that's why books and folders are powerful) and the labels help define uses, but in many instances, the level of organization you need is an open bin with some dividers - the drawer organizer, cube storage, cardboard box, book bin, cafe tray etc. Computer file systems are somewhat resistant to unlabelled open-bin storage because that means you're allocating with less precision, but I think everyone in practice knows that they will shove things in "Documents" or "Downloads" and just periodically purge it.

MarceColl 3y ago

I think that's the whole point of this system, when you have infinite tags it's impossible to maintain a correct taxonomy, you add #great-graphics to this game, but now you have to backfill it to all other games, or in the future you may miss them. They created this so the hierarchy is unambiguous (as much as possible), you want a document, you are two steps away from it in an easy to find way. tag systems have far too much maintenance and adding a new tag is almost impossible to do exhaustively so you have a lot of partial tags.

cjbprime 3y ago
> you want a document, you are two steps away from it in an easy to find way This isn't a response to the parent commenter's point, right? They were describing how many projects have items where a resource easily fits within the scope of N different categories, at which point they become max N steps away from it, not max 2 steps.
- horsawlarway 3y ago
  Two thoughts: 1. This is much, much less likely with the enforced limits on categorization in the post. 2. No - you are still 2 steps away. Make a choice about where that item lives. If it's shared across many categories, maybe you really need a distinct category like "Ambiguous" or "Shared"
  - albedoa 3y ago
    > No - you are still 2 steps away. Make a choice about where that item lives. You misunderstand. The max N steps are at the point of recall, not categorization decision.
majkinetor 3y ago
#great-graphichs problem is not something category based system will solve either, as you have the same problem. Nothing will, to be honest, maybe AI eventually and even it can't do it in all the things. > you want a document, you are two steps away from it in an easy to find way This is not how people work in general. This kind of thing might be OK for institution for taxonomy like collections.
chaxor 3y ago
This is a great point about tag maintenance *if you have to make the tags yourself*. However, if you have a simple ML system that you can run to categorize your files and pull out good single word descriptors that have a large explained variance over your files, you can run this and check the tags that are constructed. I think there's a good way forward that uses typical hierarchical Johnny.Decimal filesystems, with an overlay filesystem with tags that can update the tags every so often based on the content in the files. Obviously letting the user have a hand in this via a TUI/gui would be helpful for choosing tags for which they're comfortable. Unfortunately I haven't settled on a good filesystem with tags (how to do this with ZFS?) or how to interact with it as a network filesystem served to many different OS (cifs with tags?).
- esperent 3y ago
  > However, if you have a simple ML system Or the old-school method, a community of people with tagging powers and a few moderators to do sanity checks.
- MarceColl 3y ago
  It doesn't seem to me like a simple ML system, it needs to be able to extract tags from all kinds of filetypes (video, games, images, assets, text, ...), at a decent speed and then it has to assign tags to what you would also assign, because if it doesn't do that then it's even worse, because you can never find anything as your mapping and the ML mapping would not be the same.

bachmeier 3y ago

Your argument seems to come up a fair amount in these discussions. In the end, you have to deal with storage of many items, and you can either browse or search. The browse approach requires you to know where you'll be browsing in the future. The searching approach requires you to know what to search for. No system is going to deliver all relevant documents, but you can do a good enough job with a hierarchical system plus search.

hotsauceror 3y ago
I think this is exactly right, and it is a facet of the same discoverability issues that crop up when people talk about GUI vs CLI - one is more useful when you're discovering, and one when you are searching. Tags are really set-based search operations like a SQL query, but the 'primary key' is the filename, and if you knew that you'd just search for it. You're rarely going to have a tag or attribute that can pinpoint a single document.

cnity 3y ago

Gödel's incompleteness theorems strike again.

jasode 3y ago

>Hierarchical system, folders are artifacts of the physical world in which a single object, tool, pipe, screw, book cannot be in two places at the same time. Many think hierarchies come from limits in the physical world but that's not what's happening. Yes, that's some of the cause but does not explain all of it. The deeper rooted reason is that hierarchies are a convenience to aid the human mind. Even without any limitations of physical shelves, the brain likes to: - notice the relationships from the general-to-specific and navigate them with spatial cues of dirs parent-->child-->grandchild-->etc - group related items together -- using spatial cues of moving file icons into a file system folder The world the the blog essay is working in is the os file system. The various files have to be put somewhere on the file system. Since putting hundreds/thousands of files into a single flat folder is useless, one creates some child subfolders to organize it it in some way. The tagging system assumes a different mechanism (e.g. a separate "database" of tags which filesystems like Microsoft NTFS and Linux ext4 do not have natively.) This happens above the native filesystem. (Incidentally, by placing a file into a subfolder, the name of that folder and the names of parent folders above it act as an "implied set of tags" for free.) That said, both hierarchical folders and tags solve different needs. Also, hierarchies simulate/approximate "tags" by "virtual folders" and 1-to-n softlinks. Likewise, tagging can simulate "hierarchies" via compound-multi-word-tags.

horsawlarway 3y ago

Personally - I've come to the absolute opposite opinion. To be overly blunt: "Tags fucking suck." They are literally the worst possible way to store and organize your information, and they are only useful when you just want a random sampling of a category - not a specific document or piece of information. Ex: Great for social media or looking at old photos or just playing a song from a genre you like, bad (fucking terrible) for organization and structure. --- Hierarchical structures have downsides, but the exact thing you complain about (artifacts of the physical world) is exactly their strength... You have a body that is adapted to the physical world - routing and navigation through a series of ordered steps is a VERY well developed human skill. We are primed to be able to remember things like: - Go left at the tree, - Straight until you hit road - Right at the road - continue until you hit a red house with a big garden - etc... That skill set maps directly into the hierarchical system of folder: - Find the "documents" folder on the desktop - scroll down to "my super sweet project" - open that folder - Find the "icons" folder - open it and double click "exactly_the_thing_you_wanted.jpg" ------ You can absolutely still make horrible, unorganized messes - but if done well (ex: this article is actually a fairly good system) it's a much, much better system than tags.

PaulHoule 3y ago
I’ve thought a bit about tags++, that is adding some logical and not-so-logical features to them. For instance there are ideas from OWL where you could define a category instead of other categories and their attributes, for instance tag D could be the union of tag A and tag B and the complement of tag C. Implication is also useful both as a way to implement subclassing but also containment relationships. For instance on Danbooru a character that has several forms would have the various forms of the character imply that character and the character would imply the media property that the character comes from. I am looking at what a tagging system looks like in the transformer age and one key idea is a kind of three value logic around tags which can be in a “positive”, “indeterminant” and “negative” state. If you are training a machine learning system to auto tag you will need (1) a number of examples where a tag does not apply (the tag not being applied is not evidence that the tag doesn’t apply, poor coverage of negative examples is one reason why YouTube recommendation is worse than TikTok) and (2) to deal with cases where the ML model tags something incorrectly. If the model tagging something puts it in an indeterminant polarity and that result can later be switched to negative or positive that is a great way to manage the situation.

II2II 3y ago

The article points out that it is too easy to create duplicate files. Part of that ties into what you're talking about. Part of that deals with how people deal with files (e.g. few people use versioning outside of software development). The article is suggesting that a strong hierarchical system will help to avoid that problem. Of course the other problem with tags is management. Placing something into multiple relevant categories involves more effort. Failing to place something into a relevant category makes it harder to find since you are now dealing with either a flat file namespace (worse yet, a disorganized one) or a flat tag namespace. In theory, some of this can be handled by letting someone else handle the tags (e.g. the creator, the publisher, or the seller), but that has its own problems since there is frequently a conflict of interest (e.g. irrelevant tags are applied to increase the visibility of a product). At the end of the day, we have to accept there is no perfect system of categorization. Some will prefer hierarchies. Some will prefer tags. From the tone of the article, it is clear that they prefer hierarchies.

jen729w 3y ago
> At the end of the day, we have to accept there is no perfect system of categorization. Some will prefer hierarchies. Some will prefer tags. From the tone of the article, it is clear that they prefer hierarchies. I’m the Johnny who wrote Johnny.Decimal and this is basically it. The OP clearly isn’t one of the people for whom finding JD is a massive mental relief. I know those people exist: they write and tell me. Others find the idea baffling. Stupid, even. That’s fine. If this helps you, enjoy it. If it doesn’t, use something else.
- dxs 3y ago
  Thank you. "If this helps you, enjoy it. If it doesn’t, use something else." is a sane, humble, and adult attitude. You have my respect.

phailhaus 3y ago

Workflowy [1] solves this problem by supporting mirrored nodes as well as tags. [1] https://workflowy.com/ https://workflowy.com/

edpichler 3y ago

I solved this problem with hard links. I became fan of Hierarchical systems, it just works.

dclowd9901 3y ago

While I haven’t gone so far as to attribute a numbering system to my organization, I have done well at organizing things into red-line distinctive categories. The idea is to create categories that _cannot_ overlap. If there’s any commonality between them that’s not useless, they need to be grouped at a higher level. As an example, if you’re organizing your toolbox, you don’t mark a drawer “hand tools” because it’s a useless categorization. You mark one “socket tools” which will include everything from the sockets and wrenches themselves to adapters that connect a socket to an impact wrench (but an impact wrench does not go in there because it is not exclusively a socket tool). If it really does come down to something that may really fit in two categories (hey, there’s always exceptions), you put your mindset in the place of yourself when you want to look it up: what’s the most common situation in which you’ll be looking this thing up?

frabtanium 3y ago
This is the crux of it right here. You need to decide up front, thoughtfully and carefully - where you are going to put something. Just like in the physical world. Then you need to adjust and adapt it as you go. All the benefit comes downstream from those small additions to the workflow when you go to save something digitally.

floren 3y ago

I built a hierarchical note-keeping system for myself and have been intending to add tags to it, but I've never gotten around to it -- because the hierarchy is generally "good enough" after I added two features: linking, and grep. Grep is self-explanatory. Linking works like hard links in Unix, where the same note appears as a child of multiple different parents (added a command to find "orphans" in case you unlink it from everywhere). At this point I might not even bother adding tags.

jkubicek 3y ago
> Linking works like hard links in Unix, where the same note appears as a child of multiple different parents (added a command to find "orphans" in case you unlink it from everywhere). > At this point I might not even bother adding tags. What you described with hard links is exactly how I use tags, so that would satisfy my need for tags as an organizational tool.

Imnimo 3y ago

But step 2 is to just "Make sure the buckets are unambiguously different."! How hard could that be? \s

syntheweave 3y ago

I spent some time studying the world of professional home organization(as seen on Youtube) and the core concepts always come down to these: * Allocate space up front in the form of containers * Position containers around workspaces * Use containers appropriate to the type of object and its use(e.g. "rounds in rounds" - put round bottles on turntable racks so you can spin to access) * Duplicate objects you need to use in multiple locations, e.g. scissors for the kitchen and for the office * Label spaces where things belong And the key thing to it is that this isn't a hard rule like always organizing hierarchically or always labelling. The hierarchy helps compress space(that's why books and folders are powerful) and the labels help define uses, but in many instances, the level of organization you need is an open bin with some dividers - the drawer organizer, cube storage, cardboard box, book bin, cafe tray etc. Computer file systems are somewhat resistant to unlabelled open-bin storage because that means you're allocating with less precision, but I think everyone in practice knows that they will shove things in "Documents" or "Downloads" and just periodically purge it.