A good tagging system for files for reducing information overload

Stealing from this talk, the best (personal) practice for tagging include the following.

• Limiting the vocabulary into a set number. The author recommends to limit it to 100 but lesser is better.

• Tags should always be in plural.

• Keep tags general (e.g., sports instead of bowling, basketball, or volleyball).

• No tags should be derived from file extensions (e.g., photographs, books, documents).

In my case, this is not enough since we want tags for specific things.

• Any topic-specific should be appended as a subtag (e.g., sports.bowling, sports.basketball, sports.volleyball). If a subtag are established enough, then you may classify it as a general tag.

References

Reproducible research: principles for transparent science, Module 1: Lab books and notebooks, Section 5: Finding one's way with tags and desktop search application, retrieved as of June 2020 (2020-06-24)