The Joy of Tagging: Manipulating and Mining Notebooks in Mathematica

David Reiss

Scientific Arts, LLC

Abstract

One of the key elements of a Mathematica application that deals with a variety of documents is tagging.  Mathematica's user interface for the tagging of notebooks is minimal, even though the functional interface is very powerful.  This talk is about the tricks of the trade for tagging and manipulating notebooks that I have learned and discovered through creating a very large document-oriented  Mathematica add-on called A WorkLife FrameWork. A great deal of tagging of notebooks is done in A WorkLife FrameWork, and this is used to create a very wide range of functionalities to automatically navigate amongst content, as well as to non-linearly extract desired content from notebooks that have a random assortment of material in them--the wheat from the chaff.  Also, A WorkLife FrameWork provides user interface  tools to enhance and make much more useful Mathematica's tagging potential.  I will describe how these tools were created and provide useful examples. The tricks that I will describe will allow you to design your own tagging tools whether or not you have a license to A WorkLife FrameWork.