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

Public and private (user-dependent) tags are used by the document-viewing community and by individual users, respectively.

Private Tags

• 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 only unique for a user account. Different users can have the same private tag name and apply it differently.
• Private tags are created by prefixing tags with a single # special character. Tags with other prefixes are treated as public.
• New private tags are typed into the tag-entry field using a semicolon (;) to delimit individual tags.

Public Tags

• Public tags are used to organize information for the whole portal community and are visible to all users.
• Public tags are unique on the server.
• 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 ► User Accounts ►Edit tooltip of a particular group. For more information, see the Administrator's Guide.

Accesses Required for Tag Management

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-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.