This is part 3 of a series on data organisation. Which is part of a multi-series of posts on digital resources for mental health professionals.

Tags

Tags are non-hierarchical way of organising your data. The keywords you use to describe your data are on the same level. They became very popular with social bookmarking around 2004. Many systems offer tagging as an option when editing the metadata of your files.

Tags offer flexibility in classifying your data. You don't have to worry too much about where your data fits in relation to others. However, this flexibility can lead to overuse or confusion.

A common example of problems facing tags are the issues of homonyms (the orange tag may be meant for the color or the fruit) and synonyms (different tags for the same idea).

Karl Voigt has an excellent post on tags and how to use them, in summary:

• Use as few tags as possible that are self-defined
• Decide on singular or plural
• Lower case
• Omit tags that are obvious

Tags can also be displayed in a tag cloud.

Although multiple operating systems now let you tag your files. Tags are not very portable. They may not be copied over to a different system or when sharing a file by email or through a network.

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This post is part of a challenge to write 150 blog posts of 150 words each this year. This is post 21 out of 150.