The dissertation of @publicvoit on TagTrees, while interesting in its own right, also has a very interesting overview of historical #PIM #HCI research:
https://karl-voit.at/tagstore/downloads/Voit2012b.pdf#chapter.2
Oddly, though, even though it focuses on organizing personal information including files using free-form tags, and even talks about photo management and bookmark management as application areas, it doesn't mention Indecks cards (or other edge-notched cards), Lotus Agenda, or Flickr. It does mention del.icio.us once in passing on p. 67.
The TagTrees method he proposes doesn't rely on organizing the tags themselves in a tree (like Agenda). Rather, the #tags in a TagTrees path are intersected without any concern for their order; the tree view is just an "associative browsing" affordance.
@radehi Somebody who actually read my thesis. 🙇 👋
I didn't know Lotus Agenda but the descriptions sounds like many other tools such as Hypercard.
Other things didn't get mentioned because the thesis is focusing on PIM and not collaborative tagging which is totally different in almost any aspect.
Furthermore, I personally don't like the cloud for personal data: https://karl-voit.at/cloud/ and https://karl-voit.at/cloud-data-conditions/
HTH
@publicvoit Well, I haven't read *all* of it!
I think Agenda was relevant to the dissertation because (a) it organized items primarily with tags (called "categories", with initial tagging of each new item applied using text matching rules and implication rules) and (b) it was the program the term "PIM" was invented to describe.
I agree about the drawbacks of the cloud. As the wise man said, there is no cloud; there are only other people's computers. #TahoeLAFS is a solution to the resulting loss of autonomy, but it's not widely adopted.
I don't think Flickr and del.icio.us were "totally different from PIM in almost [every] aspect". Most people used them for managing their own photos and bookmarks, in precisely the way TagTrees was designed to be used; they didn't allow you to apply or even suggest tags to other people's photos or bookmarks. (On del you could bookmark someone else's page, of course, with your own tags.)
@radehi Furthermore, I would not recommend using this kind of tagging strategy for personal items as described also on https://karl-voit.at/2022/01/29/How-to-Use-Tags/ independent of technical limitations of having "too many" tags. This is not based on research (yet) but on my personal experience. YMMV.
@publicvoit Oh, yeah, people do tagspam sometimes on Flickr! And that's partly a social thing (though sometimes it can be useful, as you say, for when you forget your tag names yourself). A controlled vocabulary takes some effort to manage, and existing software doesn't do very well at it.
@radehi Fair enough. Do you have counter examples of a (public) folksonomy where there is no "tagspamming"?
@publicvoit No, I'm pretty sure you'll find tagspamming anywhere there's a public folksonomy, just as you'll find unsolicited sales calls in any medium that permits contacting strangers. But that doesn't mean unsolicited sales calls are the same thing as telecommunications!
@publicvoit Still, I do disagree with your implicit equation of folksonomies with tagspamming.