Thoughts on my system, tag integration at the edges

The Johnny.Decimal system Concepts
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Hello!

I wanted your opinions on my system and possible integrations for some edge cases. This is a system designed for personal use, not for projects or work (I do have a small section where I add work related content, but since this isn’t too complicated I can live with just a folder where to dump those files). Obviously it’s a system designed for me, maybe other people will find it useless, I just want to organize my personal life, if I ever have a project or something like that I will consider a dedicated system for it, or an integration in the current system.

Just to give you an idea of how it works. System handles everything related to either configuration or essential files from my machine, or documents of my personal life, plus the inbox and archive. Praxis is anything I could be creating, writing is essentially my Obsidian vault, the rest is self explanatory. Media is anything I consume. Essentially I created areas based on “states” or “actions”, something along those lines.

Ｓｔｒａｔａ Ｉｎｄｅｘ

１０－１９ 『ＳＹＳＴＥＭ』

     １１．「ｐｅｒｓｏｎａｌ－ｉｄｅｎｔｉｔｙ」
     １２．「ｂａｃｋｕｐｓ」
     １３．「ｓｙｓｔｅｍ－ｃｏｎｆｉｇ」
     １４．「ｆｒｅｅｌａｎｃｅ」
     １５．「ｅｄｕｃａｔｉｏｎ」
     １６．「ｉｎｂｏｘ」
     １７．「ａｒｃｈｉｖｅ」

２０－２９ 『ＰＲＡＸＩＳ』

     ２１．「ｗｒｉｔｉｎｇ」
     ２２．「ｖｉｓｕａｌ－ｄｅｓｉｇｎ」
     ２３．「ｖｉｄｅｏ－ｐｒｏｄｕｃｔｉｏｎ」
     ２４．「ｄｅｖｅｌｏｐｍｅｎｔ」

３０－３９ 『ＭＥＤＩＡ』

     ３１．「ｔｅｘｔ」
     ３２．「ａｕｄｉｏ」
     ３３．「ｉｍａｇｅｓ」
     ３４．「ｖｉｄｅｏ」
     ３５．「ｖｉｄｅｏ－ｇａｍｅｓ」

Now, the issue comes when trying to organize everything in Media. For films and series, I have been using Radarr, Sonarr and Jellyfin. Essentially everything lies flat inside, and the user handles the content through an external application like Jellyfin. Arr apps handle the naming and conventions for the folders. I’ll try using Calibre for books. But my biggest issue is images. I don’t mean personal photos, but images, I plan using Ente for pictures, since it has face detection with AI, is private and has a ton of other filtering tools to find content, plus I’m not much of a photo guy myself so there isn’t a big collection. I’ve tried thinking about some possible JD system for images but I can’t think of anything. So essentially I’ve resorted to using Hydrus Network/Blombooru (essentially it’s a software that works like Booru, but for a single user). This takes so much time, and I’m afraid to commit so much for nothing.

Essentially I’m asking for help. Has anyone at least tried to come up with at least some sort of structure for the tagging? Should I go another route and drop the tagging?

This is the best I’ve found, it’s relted to Hydrus PTR and its docs, which at least gives you an idea of how to do it so that tagging isn’t an endless burden.

Namespaces

creator: Used for the creator of the tagged piece of media. Hydrus being primarily used for images it will often be the artist that drew the image. Other potential examples are the author of a book or musician for a song.
character: Refers to characters. James Bond is a character.
person: Refers to real persons. Pierce Brosnan is a person.
series: Used for series. James Bond is a series tag and so is GoldenEye. Due to usage being different on some boorus chance is that you will also see things like Absolut Vodka and other brands in it.
photoset: Used for photosets. Primarily seen for content from idols, cosplayers, and gravure idols.
studio: Is used for the entity that facilitated the production of the file or what’s in it. Eon Productions for the James Bond movies.
species: Species of the depicted characters/people/animals. Somewhat controversial for being needlessly detailed, some janitors not liking the namespace at all. Primarily used for furry content.
title: The title of the file. One of the tags Hydrus uses for various purposes such as sorting and collecting. Somewhat tainted by rampant Reddit parsers.
medium: Used for tags about the image and how it’s made. Photography, water painting, napkin sketch as a few examples. White background, simple background, checkered background as a few others. What you see about the image.
meta: This namespace is used for information that isn’t visible in the image itself or where you might need to go to the source. Some examples include: third-party edit, paid reward (patreon/enty/gumroad/fantia/fanbox), translated, commentary, and such. What you know about the image.

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Hi there @ghost_box!

Are you worried the Media area will contain too much, and you’re wondering how to organise things inside of there?

‘Tags’ usually don’t work as IDs in a JD system – JD IDs are for mutually exclusive topics or areas of life/work, whereas tags are properties of things and may overlap.

It sounds like you’re fairly serious about organising your media files. Do you already have a system, applications you use? Then what goes in your JDEX is usually documentation on which apps you use, where to find files, and what your workflows and processes are. It’s like if you use a text editor or IDE for programming, your config files and list of plugins don’t go in the JDEX, but in the standard locations for those files. the JDEX would have an ID named something like ‘coding tools’ where you note what you’re using and where to find it, update it, how to install it on a new computer.

Each of those categories under Media could have an ID which describes how your tagging system for that category works. The list you provide is good candidate material for (part of) a text file in your JDEX, where you go to look up which tags to fill in when you have new pictures to classify, or which tags/namespaces not to use, to avoid confusion.

I put the information right in the filename and don’t worry about tags, nor about where in the filesystem the files are.

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I’ve been thinking a bit about tags these last few months. It’s a problem I’m working on but given that I don’t have much need for tag-like solutions myself, not one I spend a lot of time thinking about.

This blog post outlines some of my concerns with tags.

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I feel you. I was in a similar place. What you are fighting is tag proliferation: tags created without a clear system, often with the same meaning but slightly different spelling. Over time, this can spiral into complete chaos.

If you really need tags, what you need is a controlled vocabulary.

One possible Johnny.Decimal-based approach is to dedicate one JDex category to tags. Each AC.ID becomes one tag group. A tag can then be written as:

AC.ID+_Term

I personally tend to use the full JDex title for tags, although the Term alone should be enough if the vocabulary is truly controlled. The important rule is this: each term must be unique. No synonyms and no homonyms.

This forces you to think carefully about what is actually worthy of becoming a tag, or, more broadly, a controlled term.

You can also add metadata to the JDex entry of the tag, such as synonyms, related terms, scope notes, or usage rules. Links can be used to indicate hierarchies or relationships between terms. However, I would avoid nested tags unless you have a very specific use case for them.

In general, I think tags should be flat and few. Use only as many as you need, but combine enough of them to retrieve the subsets and collections you actually want to find later.