Tags vs. Hierarchy

by Kevin Jones on March 16, 2009

They were easy enough to do, why not do more?

Tags vs. Hierarchy

Tags vs. Hierarchy

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Tagging Advantages:

  • Results are much more contextual*
  • Community tags
  • Fits into many ‘categories’
  • Tags are user generated
  • Not lost in a sub-sub-sub folder
  • Findability increases
  • Learning increases

*With hierarchies you are limited to one category in which to place information.  In reality, one piece of information may fit MANY different categories (sub-sub folders for example) and may fit in one for a particular context and not in the same for a different context.  Tags allow for more than one ‘category’ and this information is not pigeonholed into one.

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  • http://blog.elementk.com/ Tom Stone

    In a great many contexts, tagging is preferable. But not all of course. Sometimes by going with flat tagging you’ll lose valuable information — such as situations where the items/info/concepts being do in fact bear a hierarchical relationship to one another. This isn’t just for family trees or corporate structures either — there are plenty of things in the world that have conceptual parent/child relationships between them, and that is good info that a hierarchy system can convey nicely.

    I know you didn’t say otherwise — you were just extolling the virtues of tagging here. But I just thought I’d toss this observation into the mix… as a plea for retaining hierarchy systems where it makes sense too. Plus… there is no reason you can’t have both… a hierarchy structure complete with breadcrumb trails (even multiple placement in the structure/trails, like with eBay categories) in addition to open, flat tagging by users too. Then you get best of both worlds!

  • http://www.ovenell-carter.com/blog Brad Ovenell-Carter

    I use both tags and a few folders for my documents on my laptop: everything gets a tag (or several–Quicksilver and Hazel makes this a breeze) and some of those also get dropped into folders. Makes for super-quick retrieval.

  • George

    Tagging works well if all users adopt the same tagging dictionary. Tags can multiply and become just as disorganised and confusing as a hierarchical structure

  • http://engagedlearning.net Kevin D. Jones

    There are a couple things that that make it less cluttered: 1) Tagging is very personal. If you are looking for a particular subject, there could be thousands of tags, but you are looking only for a specific few. Much like a dictionary where there are thousands of words, but the only ones that interest you at a particular moment are the ones you will look for, the rest are ignored. 2) It is true that variations can be annoying (pict vs. picture vs. pictures). But any good tagging system will allow you to use frequently used tags so that you are consistently choosing the ones used most often and recognizable by others.

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