Explanation of New Feature: Labels

Same question, I have wanted a feature like this but I don't exactly understand how it works.

What's happening under the hood is pretty simple: You're adding a note to a selection, and that note contains a label, which you can search on.

So, what's a label? Think of a label like a little fill-in form that you can attach to any piece of text in the library. Like, say, a luggage tag. When you put a luggage tag on a parcel, you're asserting that a) that parcel now is identified as a piece of luggage, and then b) you fill out the "Name," and "Address" lines so that they know exactly whose luggage it is. Or put another way: There's a "Name" attribute and an "Address" attribute.

Labels work the same way: You grab a selection of text and affix a label. That label consists of a NAME that answers the question What is it? and optionally, supplies a set of ATTRIBUTES that answer the question What characteristics would you use to describe or identify it? What you choose as name and attributes for your label is totally up to you, the Ontologist.

An example. Let's say you heard somewhere that each law in Deuteronomy is just a more detailed expression of one of the ten commandments. For example, the command about building parapets on the roof of your house so nobody will fall off and die (Deut 22:8) is essentially a very specific way to apply the general principle "You shall not kill."

We could tag this lots of ways. You could have a label called "Laws That More Specifically Express The Concept of Not Killing" but that's cumbersome. You probably want to choose a minimal name, probably a simple noun or noun phrase, to answer the question What is it? in a general sense. I'm going to (completely arbitrarily) choose "Statute" as the name for this label. Then you want to think about the characteristics you want to describe each instance.

It'll probably make sense if we think about the problem backwards: What do we want to search for? We want to find all the statutes, and we want to be able to find the ones that are (say) expressive of the prohibition against killing. So maybe something like:

Find all the laws I've tagged: {Label Statute}

Find all the laws related to the fifth command: {Label Statute WHERE Decalogue = 5}

(I'm using a Catholic enumeration of the Ten Commandments, but you don't have to.)

You might also want to find the laws that are "apodictic" (generally applicable law) versus "casuistic" (situational or case law) versus "cultic" (specifics of worship). So, find just the case laws: {Label Statute WHERE Type = "casuistic"}

You can string multiple attributes together to narrow things down even further to (say) find all the case laws related to the fifth commandment: {Label Statute WHERE Decalogue = 5 AND Type = "casuistic"}

Let's say our Deut 22:8 example about parapets is one of the verses we'd like to find with this last query. In order for that to work, we'd need to put the following label on that verse:

Statute
Decalogue: 5
Type: casuistic

How do the attributes work? Those last two things, "Decalogue" and "Type" are attributes. Each attribute has a name and a value, and (as you discovered) the value can be of a specific type (Word Sense or Boolean [true/false]). In this example, the "Decalogue" is always going to be a number, so when we set up the highlighting style to apply this label (the easiest way to do it), then we're going to specify that attribute's value is always a number so that the entry helper will only show us numbers. Similarly, the "Type" we know is going to have three legal values, so we're going to say that the type of value for the "Type" attribute is a "List" and we're going to give the legal values separated by a semicolon.

If you had, say, an attribute that you knew was always going to be a biblical person, you'd choose "Biblical Person" as the attribute type. If you don't know or don't care, then "Any Value Type" is what you'd choose.

Anyway, the following video shows me setting up a Highlighting palette from scratch to show the "Statute" example above. I set it to "prompt me for attributes" so that whenever I apply that highlighter style it pops up a little form for me to fill in. The attribute list in the style is what sets up the blank form. Then I apply the label to a verse, fill in the form that pops up. Finally, I do a little searching to demonstrate that you can indeed find that verse by the queries above.

http://screencast.com/t/QzhHb8jyW 

Since this goes into note files, I could make a Faithlife group and share this document. Anyone in that group could grab a copy, or they could even collaborate on it.

This is very definitely a power-user feature. But it opens up a HUGE range of possibilities. 

Hope that helps! I could work out other examples, too.