Quantum OS Tagging Conventions

Info

This document refers to Obsidian tag functionality and not Tag notes

These are guidelines to be closely adhered to and only broken by considered exception. They recognise firstly that Tags are not knowledge, yet a Personal knowledge management systems must be flexible.

Tags are a mess

I have changed my approach to tags, but not yet updated all my notes. Tags are now “pure” metadata about a note, not about the content of the note. For that I use [[link]]. This is a major change and I still have many tags lying around. All content published on The Quantum Garden Website has been cleared up.

When to tag

Tags are used for:

• State tracking
  • Throughout the life of a note it may change state multiple times, across multiple areas.
  • Within a parent/child tag, it should only have one state at a time. This needs to be manually controlled.
  • The main tags for tracking are #state\…
• Typing
  • Allows quick identification of notes of the same type across the system without the need to manage them in folders (which are unsuitable for this and should be tied more to content than type.)
  • Notes may have multiple types as applicable but this would be rare
  • Video games are tagged for the platform they were played on, not the platform they were released for i.e.. a PlayStation 4 game played on a PlayStation 5 is tagged as a #platform/playstation-5 game.

What should not be a tag

In all cases, remember Tags are not knowledge. To facilitate linking and emergent ideas, some items which could be tags, are not. Quantum OS Property Conventions override Quantum OS Tagging Conventions for linking notes.

Tags are not used for classifying note content in relationship to other notes. Instead of tags, use a Map of Content or Tag note.

Naming tags

• All tag names are written in kebab-case.

First class tags

Groups	Purpose
#class/*	See Quantum OS Class Tags.
#calendar/*	Applied to all #journal entries to indicate an individual day or year summary. Unsure if there is value here.
#journal/*	See Quantum OS Journal Tags.
#network/*	Defines my relationship to a #class/person.
#source	A note representing something external to my own notes, though I may have created notes about it. See Quantum OS Source Naming Rules.
#status/*	One of Active, Completed, Dropped or someday-maybe.
#travel/*	Used to collate #journal entries from the same event into travel logs.

In the table * signifies the tag group name followed by a sub-name.

Tag location within a note

Tags relating to the note as a whole, should be entered using the Obsidian property tab for consistency and will be displayed in YAML at the top of a note. Manual tag adjustment here must keep to each on a separate line—even if there is only a single tag. This allows for bulk processing by external software outside of Obsidian in the future if required.

---
tags:
  - tag1
  - tag2
---

Within the list of properties, tags are placed near the top. See Quantum OS Property Conventions.

Within a note, [[link]] is the way to cross-reference notes, not tags.

When discussing a tag backticks to wrap the tag name and leading #. Otherwise the note will be tagged.

If tempted to use a tag in it's normal #tag form, think hard about why and find a proper [[link]] instead.

This situation usually points to the need for Maps of content as described in Tags are not knowledge.

Maintaining tags

Tags can be renamed if necessary as they are primarily structural.

Be aware that when renaming tags, those within an Obsidian Dataview plugin query will not be renamed even though the front-matter tag will have been changed.

```dataview
list from #project
where contains(tags,"class/video-games")
```