Any dangers to replicating tags?

DEVONthink
1

Is there anything I should consider, or any reason to avoid replicating tags? From a technical perspective, ie… I don’t want to break anything! For example, hypothetically, I have tags in the following hierarchy

Companies
— Anthropic
— Google
— OpenAI

AI Chat Interfaces
— Claude
— Gemini
— ChatGPT

Is there any reason to not relicate the names of the AI chat interfaces so that they are also sub-tags under their corporate owners?

Companies
— Anthropic
------ Claude
— Google
------ Gemini
— OpenAI
------ ChatGPT

AI Chat Interfaces
— Claude
— Gemini
— ChatGPT

Thank you

2

Development could provide their opinion on this but generally we don’t recommend using redundant tags. A tag that would be redundant should be treated as a top-level tag.

3

Thanks, @BLUEFROG. Glad I asked! :smiley:

1 Like
4

It’s possible to assign tags to a tag. You can tag Gemini with both Google and AI. Then, when you assign the tag Gemini to a document, the document will get all 3 tags.

As @Bluefrog has suggested, if you do this, it’s advisable to treat all those tags as top-level tags, which makes management easier.

4 Likes
5

Interesting. Replicating tags seems to work just like replicating groups, but being of sound mind I defer to @BLUEFROG.

Better than replicating, tags can have subtags. You can have a hierarchy of tags just like you can with groups. Tags, of course, being groups with a few extra rules applied to their behavior.

If you want tags called Category1 and Category2, both can have subtags of the same name.

As much as I enjoy running with scissors inside Devonthink, I would create the tags by adding them to a document as Category1/MyTag and Category2/MyTag.

Note, however, the slash notation isn’t persistent. You’ll see MyTag and Category1, not Category1/MyTag in the tag bar under an item preview.

Devonthink won’t be confused, but it may not show you what you want.

If you add Category1/MyTag and Category2/MyTag to an item, you’ll see three tags, not four. Using reveal tag on the one instance of MyTag will show one of the MyTag instances, not both.

If you navigate into MyTag under Category 1, you’ll see all Category1/MyTag items. The same will be true if you navigate to MyTag under Category2.

The display of tags in the tag bar for individual items/documents may not be what you expect.

6

Ok, that’s an interesting approach. Thanks @meowky I’ll play around with this

7

Thanks, @Amontillado. This looks interesting too. I also enjoy “running with scissors” inside of devontionk, so I’ll see how this works, too.

2 Likes