Question Tagging available in webtrees

In the last few days, several custom modules have been published, all of which support a new function, “tagging”, i.e. the marking of data records. This function allows, for example, to flexibly mark selected people in the family tree.

What can you use “tags” for?
The first thing that comes to mind is tagging people; in principle, other objects can also be tagged. Tags can be, for example, the following markings:

1. People: “euthanasia victim”, “twin”, “Y-DNA haplogroup E-M35”, “famous person”, “emigration to Australia”
2. Families: “childless”
3. Places: “lost place”, “place to visit”
4. Sources: “conflicting sources”
5. Media objects: “edited/created by AI”.

Tags are statically attached to objects by the user (and removed again if necessary). An object can also carry multiple tags. You can assign a colour to a tag so that, for example, when a person is graphically displayed in the family tree, it is highlighted in that special colour. Or you can assign a small icon to the name of a tagged person. The person's specific characteristic is then visible in all lists and reports that use the person's name.

If you have a large family tree, it can make sense to define subsets, such as the subgroups of people who emigrated to Australia or all people for whom a DNA test is available. You can then, for example, select these tagged groups and export them separately as a GEDCOM file so that you or another user can further edit them in another program.

Implementation in webtrees
You can create tags as “shared notes”, i.e. with the GEDCOM identifier NOTE, for example in the form “0 @X114@ NOTE TAG: famous person”. Such tags can be created and edited using the standard functions of webtrees, but this works better with the new extension module tsm (tagging service management) and the extended clippings cart module cce. The modules GVExport and the Vesta module “Classic Look & Feel” with the new “Name Badge” function allow tags to be visualized.

Links:

1. tsm
2. cce
3. GVExport
4. Vesta CLAF  (download from  cissee.de )

Outlook
Currently, the tagging functions are not yet fully implemented, but it I hope that more and more modules will contribute something here. The documentation in the German-language webtrees manual is also still in progress.

It would be helpful if the “Tagging” function were supported directly by the GEDCOM standard to be used across programs. The implementation with the help of a “shared note” allows export and import via GEDCOM (in GEDCOM 5.5.1 as a “shared NOTE”, in GEDCOM 7.0 as “SNOTE”), but whether such a note is a tag or simply just a textual annotation to an object is not clear to other programs. A translation option for tags into other languages is also desirable; currently, the tag titles are untranslated user input.

Give it a try and report your experience. I like those new functions very much!

The reaction to my post here was overwhelmingly underwhelming. Nonetheless, I find the tagging method incredibly powerful and helpful, so much so that I've written a dedicated blog article for the German-speaking webtrees community, which was published yesterday on the CompGen blog . I understand that tagging isn't exactly straightforward to use, but it offers so many possibilities that, in my view, it's worth the effort to get to grips with it. Has anyone here made their first attempts at using it? Do we need to explain the topic more clearly? Is there anyone using tagging in a different genealogy program who can share their experiences?

I’ve never understood what “tags” do for me in a genealogy, and I still don’t !  I monitor several other program’s forum pages and when I read about tags I just don’t understand their unique use!

I think of a tag as an attribute/category of an item, for instance I use tags within an .jpg image for places, people, and dates.  When I think of genealogy and the people within my database, the attributes of that person are contained in their name, description, and other GEDCOM attribute facts.  Categorizing of people in genealogy, tends to be by family group (i.e. surname), location (birth, cemetery, farm/domicile), religion, all of which are already attributes available in GEDCOM.  For attributes like “military service” and DNA, (which are not currently in v5.5.1, but are expected to be added in v7.1 of GEDCOM), I would add them for now with FACT tags and wait until they are officially added to GEDCOM.

My suspicion is that these attributes need better reports to search out these categories and to expose them as a unit. Currently webtrees needs a new reporting system which has been on the road-map for years.  Other needs put forth by users have sidelined this effort.

Ken, you are right: it would be nice if all reports and lists would be so flexible that they could present all types of events/facts you can imagine.

I would for example like to highlight in an ancestor report all persons with the catholic religion. I would like to see the religion as a colour in the boxes of a graphical tree. Somebody else has other needs or ideas. If there are n things you like to visualize in m modules/list/diagrams you have to implement n functions in m modules, ie you have a complexity of n times m. Tagging allows you to reduce the complexity to n+m. Because n and m are greater than 2 this reduces the complexity. You have to implement the possibility to set and manage tags and you have to implement in each module to highlight/show tags in each visualization module. This is the reason for using tagging. It makes it a bit more complex for the users, but it allows much greater flexibility and power in the visualization of your data.

For example, you can define a tag for each farm. Then you can tag all the people who lived on that farm at any time regardless if they are related to each other or not. If you show the ancestor tree of a person you can show the persons of different farms in different colours (using the GVExport module). So you can see how the farms have a relation to the members of an ancestor tree.

In Germany, we have sometimes in one village several people with exactly the same name at the same time, but they are maybe only distant cousins or not related. If you are entering data in your tree you have to be always very careful to select the right person, because the name is not unique. It helps if you tag the people in the village by the name of their farm/house. Then you can define an icon which is connected to the name via a name badge (using the Vesta module). The name badge depends on the tag so that you can see in all lists or diagrams of webtrees - where a name is shown - which person is the right one. So tagging helps to make person names unique.

An addition for our Chinese webtrees users: maybe tagging can be used to add the generation flag to the person names in your tree. What do you think about that?

just my 2 cents...

I must say that i'm more on the side of @norwegian_sardines Ken's side...
I understand that tagging is a powerfull tool and even more with the more powerfull GVExport module...
But, while still in the research of ancestors i dont see a use case for tags right now and dont have time for to play with...

for the argument with tagging the "farm" or "house" locations i'm still in the process of finding a way to track people and/or generations who lived there... for now I'm adding shared places to the people or familys... so i also have the possibility to add further notes to that place and can keep track of all who lived there...

f.e. i add Town as place and the address/location as shared place... (if there is a GOV id, I'll add this too)
 
this fits best for me right now...

 

I think it is important to emphasize that tagging is not an alternative method for storing information in the family tree. GEDCOM already offers a lot of options for this, all of which should be used. So using shared places for farms or houses and adding information about such a place there is very good.

Tagging is used for the flexible management of data in the family tree and the genealogical work; it supports the visualization of information in a flexible manner and therefore also serves for quality assurance. 

I use tagging of sorts in that I attach a shared note to any individuals in my tree that I identify as a "WW I solider" or "WW II soldier" for example. This has been useful, mostly for curious purposes, to group together unrelated people who might have been in the same part of the world around the same time (but perhaps in different military forces).

Further, there are various individuals in my tree who had notable or unusual deaths, and I have previously considered creating a new shared note to group these people together, again, mainly out of curiosity.

So for myself, I think the idea of a tagging system has merits. My current method is very simple, but when I get the chance I will take a look at Hermann's modules.

I have to say that none of those modules mentioned in my post were developed by me. I had some discussions with two of the module authors, but not more. I like the idea.

I just found a YouTube video about MyTreeTags for Ancestry . The drawbacks of those tags are: that you cannot import/export them and managing them is time-consuming. So the tagging in webtrees is better because you can import/export the tags and use the module tsm and the extended clippings cart (cce) to manage them. An advantage is that the predefined tags in Ancestry are translated into any supported language and that the MyTreeTags can be used for filtering anywhere in the user interface.    

I reviewed the recommended video on Ancestry.

The video starts out talking about the way people “hack” their Ancestry tree to provide visual ways of identifying individuals.  For example: Setting the name to include “5th Grandfather”, “Adopted” or “No Children”.  All of these reasons to use tagging are probably great in Ancestry because many people using this tool don’t have a great sense of how to record information.  Ancestry allows them to put non name information in the “suffix” of the name and Ancestry says this is Okay!

The presenter goes on to say, “would it not be great if you could just tag a person as “adopted”, “military”, “immigrant” or that you are actively working on an individual?  Well I says yes, and you can do most of this without adding tags to the GEDCOM, GEDCOM has an Adoption fact, an immigrant fact, with the help of the FACT tag introduce “military”, DNA and others. And webtrees has a “to-do” tag for recording your activity on the person.

The video also talked about marking a “direct ancestor”.  Marking these and maintaining them is time consuming.  However, because the data is already in the GEDCOM a simple report could do the job and be automatic/on demand.

I don’t use the “to-do” tag so I can’t speak to what options it provides but it could have additional attributes if you need a “brick wall” identifier!

Therefore, after looking at this video I’m still not convinced that tagging is valuable, 1) Because it is not part of GEDCOM, 2) Much of the data is already in the GEDCOM, 3) A reporting or display system is required.

Id still like to see someone to work on a better GEDCOM reporter that could include lists of people that are adopted, immigrated, had military service, or were born in a specific year/place or are buried in a particular cemetery.  Alluding the current GEDCOM.  This enhancement may need additional database changes (indexes/record types) but these would probably need to be added as well for tags.

Just my 2cents!

@Ken, thank you for reviewing that video.

I agree that it is horrible for Ancestry users to add "tags" like "5th Grandfather" or other information to a person's name. It is horrible to use the personal photo of a person to show a sailing boat (to identify a boat that was used during the emigration to the US) or coats and arms.

So offering MyTreeTags in Ancestry should reduce such behaviour. You are right that is redundant to use tags like "adopted" or "immigrant" because such information is already stored in GEDCOM. To use tags to manage genealogical data is good usage in my opinion, but again you are right that we can use already research tasks (_TODO) in webtrees (Ancestry does not offer _TODO). So it is necessary to outline when we should use _TODO and when we can use tags to manage data or the genealogical process.

My idea was not that we should use tagging like Ancestry is offering. Their solution has many disadvantages as you said and as it was said in the video: tags are not stored in GEDCOM, maintaining the MyTreeTags is time-consuming, and some information is already stored in GEDCOM. My idea was to learn from their faults.
 

hermann wrote:

An addition for our Chinese webtrees users: maybe tagging can be used to add the generation flag to the person names in your tree. What do you think about that?

This is a good idea, thank you for remembering Chinese users!
Zibei, also known as Zipai, is a writing system used in traditional Chinese culture to indicate family hierarchy.

This practice usually occurs in names, mostly located in the middle of the name. The connotations of the generation of characters usually include self-cultivation and family harmony, peaceful governance of the people, auspiciousness and health, prosperity and development, etc. It is an important naming form that has been passed down for thousands of years in China and a special "ritual" system that is still reflected in modern times.
In the past, Chinese names were usually composed of three parts. The first part was the surname, which was inherited from the family and remained constant. The second part is the word generation, which represents a character of the same generation. This character comes from a family motto written by ancestors or a poem with beautiful meanings. In the same place, if you know a person's full name, you know how to call their honorific title, because the word generation represents generation. The third part is the name given by the parents or ancestors to this child, which is a personal expectation and blessing for this child.
For example, my full name is Chen Xi Guo. Chen is my surname, which comes from a patriarchal family. Xi is a generation. It is the same word as my brother and sisters. Guo is my first name, which represents my own personality, In Chinese, it is a meaning of fruit and achievement.

While I’m familiar with many naming conventions around the world or I can visualize how they may work, the Chinese use Zibei and generational names always escapes me.  Thank you for helping us to better understand this system!

My first question is, Are the generational names unique within a patriarchal family?  This is to say no ancestor or descendent will ever have Xi as a generational name!

2) would other individuals from the same patriarchal family at the same generation (cousins, your mother/father’s sibling’s children) have the same generational name as you?

3) would other individuals from other patriarchal families use the same generational name.  For example, I consider the men and women I went to school with (give or take 10 years) of my same generation (I’m of the ‘boomer’ generation), would they also have the same generational name? In your example ‘Xi’.

Thanks

I only really noticed these name badges now.
Since I get along better with the German language, I will devote myself to your blog article and read it.
I still don't understand how to use it correctly.

I believe there is no right or wrong way to use tags. They should be employed to organize your genealogical data as needed. To me, tags represent "meta" information rather than fundamental genealogical details.

For instance, I recently tagged all individuals in my tree associated with the "organ building" profession (totalling about 60). Afterwards, I added them and their parents to the clippings cart and visualized them using GVExport. Within this custom module, I highlighted their personal boxes with a distinctive colour. This allowed me to observe the occupational lineages within my tree for the first time, offering a fascinating insight since no other report could address this specific research question.

@Mabba: what is your idea of using tags? Using them for name badges? Using them for specific graphical elements in a diagram? Using them to group records in your tree for exporting them together? Or something else?

Hermann,

Therefore, the GEDCOM tag is OCCU (occupation) “organ builder”.
Then all you need is the ability to either color the box in a diagram or create a report that shows all the individuals that are of that occupation!  

I suspect that a module could be used to color the box, maybe via CSS, but this is out of my understanding.

Yes, @Ken, I'm using the OCCU tag. But only some of the "organ builder" related people in my tree have this occupation. Some of them are working in an organ builder company as accountants or some have a special task like carpenters. So I tagged all those people in several search steps and finally got about 60 people. Several of them are related to each other. So there are dynasties.

I'm using GVExport as a powerful diagram to show all tagged people and their relationships. I don't know any other diagram in webtrees that can show a special coloured box for people with a specific occupation. But GVExport can use tags (shared NOTE) for that task. There is no need for a new module or special CSS code. This is the big advantage of tagging. Tagging is for organizing data and presenting information (using NOTE), the genealogical data itself is stored in the dedicated GEDCOM tags like OCCU.

Ok, so you are tagging people who are not just “organ builders” the occupation, but people who work in the “organ building” industry, which would include accountants, and other associated workers.

If setting these type of affiliations up was important to me, in GEDCOM v5.5.1 I would create a FACT tag as follows:

1 FACT Organ Building
2 TYPE Industry
2 DATE
2 PLAC

This could also apply to individuals working in for example healthcare, which would include occupations like, Doctor, Nurse, Dietitian, Computer Programmer.

1 FACT Healthcare
2 TYPE Industry


 

Yes, you can use FACT. I'm using
But this topic is not about how to store information in GEDCOM, it is about how to use tags to manage and present your data in webtrees. No diagram in webtrees allows you to show a person with the "FACT Organ Building" in another colour as a person without that FACT. But there are now possibilities to achieve this using tags (based on shared NOTE).