Taxonomy: Categorizing Content with Tags

Overview

Tagging is a public and private labeling mechanism that provides a simple and effective way to organize, categorize and bookmark information in codebeamer. Tags are short textual labels that can be attached to the following codebeamer entities:

• Documents and directories
• Wiki pages
• Issues
• Forum posts (incoming mails)

The tags on codebeamer artifacts have a common appearance, and are edited the same way. Entities with the same tag can be retrieved by clicking on the tag, then on the entity.The primary purpose of tagging is to organize and structure information. Tags are not part of the entities and all tag operations occur without actually editing the entities.By clicking on the tag-words, entities labeled with a particular tag are displayed.

Assigning Tags to Entities

The pop-up tag-assignment window can be accessed:

• either by clicking on more menu ► Tags
  
• or, by clicking the Tags link below the action menu bar
  

Once the tag-assignment window is opened, tags can be added to, or removed from the current entity. The edit window also describes how to make a private tag.

Public and Private Tags

This section describes the purpose and characteristics of the private and public tags in a Codebeamer instance.

Private Tags

Private tags are unique to each user account and allow users to privately categorize information. For example, a user can categorize all entities that need attention with the #urgent tag.

The following characteristics define the private tags:

• Permissions—Every user can create private tags. No specific permissions are required.
• Visibility—The private tags are visible only to the users who create them.
• Uniqueness—The private tags are unique to a user account. As a result, different users can create and use identical private tag names independently, without causing any conflict or overlapping.
• Prefix—The private tags are created by prefixing tags with a single # special character. Tags that have other prefixes are treated as public tags.

Public Tags

Public tags are unique to the Codebeamer instance and provide a way to organize information for all users. For example, a release manager can categorize all entities related
to an upcoming software release with the release tag.

The following characteristics define the public tags:

• Permissions—To create public tags, you require the Tag - Create user group permission. To administer the public tags, you require the Tag - Administrate user group permission. For more information about these permissions, refer to Managing Users and User Groups.
• Visibility—The public tags are visible to all users.
• Uniqueness—The public tags are unique on the Codebeamer instance. As a result, public tags with identical names are not allowed.

This table provides a quick comparison of private and public tags, highlighting the key differences:

Permissions Required to Manage the Tags

The following table summarizes the specific scenarios and the detailed permissions for the two types of tags:

System Administrators (or those in a group with Tag - Create or Tag - Administrate privileges) create public tags in the same pop-up tag-selector window where other users create private tags, or select public tags.

The edit window is brought up by clicking on Actions... ► Add Tag selections in the upper right of the document display screen.

Tags created by users with Label Admin permissions

• do not need prefixes #
• are visible to everyone with document view permissions
• are listed in the public tag list.

The public tag list can be viewed by selecting the Tags link at the top left of the document.

Administering Tags

Public tags can be administered by users having Label Admin permission. See Administrator's Guide for further information.

Private tags can be administered by anyone with view permissions on the entity. It is possible to

• Rename Tags - change the name of the tag, provided that the new tag is not the same as an existing tag. When the tag name overlaps with an existing tag name, tag merging is required (see below);
• Delete Tags - the tag immediately disappears from each affected entity. This change cannot be reversed;
• Merge Tags - when trying to rename a tag to a tag-name that already exists, the two tags can be merged after a confirmation question. This means that the source tag is deleted and the entities currently labeled with it are re-labeled with the target tag. With the appropriate permissions, this feature can be used to convert a public tag to a private one and vice versa, by specifying public or private names. These changes cannot be reversed.

Click on the Tags menu on the toolbar of the Personal Page to access the Tag list where tags can be edited and deleted.