Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies (2017)
Or better idea. Use directed graphs. Directed graphs are strictly a superset of both tree and tag (set) functionality.<p>Tags (sets) can be thought as a special case of directed graph. You make the tag a node in the graph and you make files also nodes and have edge pointing in direction of the tag node.<p>You can then do graph queries to find files tagged in a certain way.<p>But graphs offers so much more.<p>Because they are superset of both trees and sets, you can use it to represent both, <i>at the same time</i>.<p>It is not very useful to have a lot of things tagged the same way because you end up with just a long list of things. Whereas in a graph you could say that you want to find objects from which you can reach certain tag node and all these objects can still have their own structure and even be part of multiple structures.<p>For many years I had this idea to build my PIM where I could make arbitrary nodes being anything that could let me connect anything to anything.<p>A node could be an email, a file, a link to external external website, a task, a contact, a reminder, etc.<p>And you could connect everything to anything and have, for example a project that has important emails attached to it, the email could have attached a reminder to respond and a file that you want to include in response, and a note.<p>You could browse this graph as a tree because locally it could be interpreted as a tree, you open the tree one level by finding all elements that pointing to the node.