Can tags have hierarchy?

Question

Does anyone have experience working with nested tags? I could not find any websites that allow users to have hierarchies in their tags (equivalent to non-mutually exclusive categories). Is it a bad practice in general? If so, why?

Answer 1

The idea behind tags is the same as the idea behind labels in GMail: the ability to assign multiple tags to a single post/mail/.../item.

The GMail labeling of e-mails was born specifically to counter the need in most e-mail clients to archive an e-mail in a single specific folder which ususally would be part of a hierarchy of folders. So what do you do with an e-mail that belongs both in the folder "advertisments" and in the folder "creditors"?

GMail was the first to solve this using labels: you just assigned both the label "advertisements" and "creditors" to the e-mail and you would be able to find it both when showing all e-mails in the "advertisements" label ("folder") and the "creditors" label/folder.

Some people still want to organise their GMail labels in a hierarchical manner and there is actually a GMail "labs" feature that allows this. But in my opinion it goes against everything for which these labels are intended and were invented.

Similarly, organising tags in a hierarchy goes against the grain. How can a specific document/mail have tags from different branches of the hierarchy tree? Technically not a problem of course, but it just doesn't make any sense (at least not to me).

In many CMS's you will find both tags and categories. Usually you can assign multiple tags, but just one category. And you will find that the categories actually can be organised in a hierarchical manner...

So I would say that the reasons most websites won't allow you to have tag hierarchies is that tags are not intended to be used hierarchically and that if you want to do something in a hierarchical manner you need to use categories (or whatever the website offers by way of a hierarchical organisation system).

Answer 2

The problem with trying to use heirarchies is that it's seldom you find universal agreement on what the heirarchy should be. The heirarchy can also change in unpredictable ways.

If you had a tag ASP.NET then should it's parent be Web Development Frameworks or .NET Frameworks?

If you had a tag Iron Python that was a child of Microsoft Products, what do you do now that it's been open sourced?

If you have a tag Functional Programming, what parent tag makes sense? You don't want to have generic tags like Programming Paradigms that don't make sense as tags, just to be able to group things.

Generally, it seems that attempts to arrange tags into a heirarchy are seeking to add semantics to each tag, so that searching and classification become richer. I'm not convinced that it works.

Answer 3

Though I agree in part with the answers already posted, you can impose structure on tags. Rather than using 'hierarchy', a better term is 'relationship'. Consider some of the potential relationships between two tags:

• is parent of
• is child of
• is type of
• is subset of
• is opposite of

Of course, each type of tag relationship adds extra complexity to your user interface, so you need to weigh cost versus benefit for each additional layer you include. For most use cases, it's probably better to not define tag relationships.

Answer 4

We are facing a similar situation where our client has a huge catalog and wants to allow its users to successively filter down the content by drilling down into a hierarchy defined by them; a hierarchy they can decide to change anytime and as much as they want. Add to that the fact that the target platform is Android, its omnipresent back button and navigation back stack and you find yourself with an interesting challenge.

We came to the conclusion that classification and categorization are two different things. Is Evil Dead a horror, b-movie or a b horror movie? For categorization, it does not matter. The movie will have both tags associated with it. As for classification, it depends on what you want to put in evidence. The hierarchy of tags is completely independent from the categorization of an item. So for example, it probably would make more sense to classify Evil Dead as a b-movie under the horror category. However, during the b-movie festival weekend, one might want to put b-movies in evidence and bring that category up the classification tree. I don't believe organizing your tags hierarchically is necessarily a bad practice.