Taxonomy: Categorizing Content with Tags

Overview

Tags are a public and private labeling mechanism that provide a simple and effective way to organize, categorize and bookmark your codeBeamer information. Tags are short textual labels that can be attached to these CodeBeamer entities:

1. Documents and directories,
2. Wiki pages,
3. Issues,
4. Forum posts (incoming mails).

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 themselves.

By clicking the tag-words you can see which issues, wiki pages, documents or posts are labeled with a particular tag.

Assigning Tags to Entities

When viewing an entity, clicking the Actions.. Add Tag takes you to a pop-up Tag-assignment window where you can assign tags to, or delete tags from the current entity. The edit window also has a short explanation of how to make a private tag.

Figure: Tag Edit Pop-Up Window

Public and Private Tags

Public and private (user-dependent) tags are used by the document-viewing community and by individual users, respectively. Private tags are only visible to the user who made them and they allow users to privately organize documents according to their own needs. Private tags are created by prefixing tags with a single # special character. Tags with other prefixes will be treated as public. New tags are typed into the tag-entry field using a semicolon (;) to delimit individual tags.

Public tags are used to organize information for the whole portal community and they are visible to all users. Private tags are used by a single user to categorize information and are only visible to that user. While public tags are unique on the server, private tags are only unique for a user account. Different users can have the same private tag name and apply it differently.

The LABEL_PUBLIC_CREATE or LABEL_PUBLIC_ADMIN or Label Admin permissions, necessary for managing public tags, are controlled by the System Administrator. The ability to create or administer public tags is controlled in the group permissions, accessed by the System Administrator in the System Admin area, under User Accounts, and the tooltip Edit for a particular group.  For more information, see the Administrator's Guide .

The following table summarizes what permissions are required to perform certain actions on the two types of tags:

System Administrators, or those in a group with Tag-Create or Tag-Admin privileges, create Public Tags in the same pop-up tag-selection window where other users create Private Tags, or select public tags.  The edit window is brought up using the Actions... then Add Tag selections in the upper right of the document display screen.  The difference for those with Label Admin permissions is that their tags need no prefix #, their tags are visible to everyone with document view permissions, and the tags are listed in the public tag list.  The public tag list is 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 to see how to add the required permissions. 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 will immediately disappear from each entity that has it. This change can't be reversed;
• Merge Tags - if you try to rename a tag to a tag-name that already exists, after a confirmation question you can merge those two tags. This means that the source tag will be deleted and the entities currently labeled with it will be re-labeled with the target tag. With the appropriate permissions, this feature can be used to convert a public tag to a private one or conversely, to convert a private tag to a public one, by specifying public or private names. Be careful, these changes can't be reversed either.