Can you apply a tag to a tag?

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1

I’m looking for the ability to set a tag as a subgroup of multiple tags. Similar to nested tags except you can have more than one parent tag.
for example. #Actors #Singers #Elvis
The tag #Elvis would show under #Elvis #Actors/Elvis and #Singers/Elvis

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2

Yes, you can set a tag as a subgroup of multiple tags. Implement a tagging system that allows a tag to have multiple parent tags, enabling #Elvis to appear under both #Actors/Elvis and #Singers/Elvis. This feature can be achieved through a database schema supporting many-to-many relationships between tags and subgroups.

3

Sorry, you’ve lost me. Are you saying obsidian is already capable of this database or are you saying that I can write a plugin to do it?

4

@davidmiller5274 Can you explain a bit more about this and how you came to your suggestion?

5

then you can use dataview as well as core search to find notes with nested tags

6

How? From what I can see obsidian tags only support a tag being nested under one parent.
#Elvis #Actors/Elvis and #Singers/Elvis would be treated as 3 different tags.

7

correct
you need to query for them expecting the one grouped result

8

Consider a tags property like another, singer, actor, elvis, which should be considered a subtag of either of the other tags? With a flat declaration is hard to indicate nesting. With just one entry, like in actor/elvis it’s hard to indicate multiple top levels.

One way to do such a thing would be to use multiple properties like:

id: elvis 
parents:
- actor 
- singer

Such a scheme would allow for at least Dataview to be able to pick out any suitable parent, like any actor with a name starting on e and so on.

It would not be listed in the tags display as tags, but if you want that you’d need to use the multiple tags entries like in:

tags:
- elvis 
- actor/elvis 
- singer/elvis

In short, using nested tags allows for just one parent unless you repeat the information multiple times. An advantage is automatic sorting when using the tags pane, and some benefits when using ordinary searches. Using multiple fields allows for true multi inheritance, but you need specialised tools, like dataview, to handle this information.

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9

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