Question on re-use of tags

[orichters]

Dear @danielhuppmann,

I have a question regarding tags. For example, energy/tag_all_sectors.yaml contains Industry tags that will have substantial overlap with the tags used in the industry group and also the macro group will have Export|Industry|*. Can we use tags from other folders? Will there be tags that can be used in multiple variable groups? Or should we simply not care that much and you clean that up anyway? ;)

[danielhuppmann]

Thanks for the question.

The folder structure is irrelevant for the nomenclature package, it is only intended to support humans in understanding some hierarchy or sectoral clustering of variables. So you can re-use any tags across all sub-folders of each dimension (variable, region, ...).

Practically speaking, if there is a number of additional variables that only make sense for the industry sector, I suggest to "carve out" the list of industries from the Sector tag and create an own tag-list that you can reuse for the industry-specific variables - and duplicate all variables that currently use the Sector tag list with that additional Industry-Sector tag list.

I suggest the following:

• identify the additional (sub)sectors and variables that you consider relevant for the common-definitions package
• describe the changes in an issue and discuss there
• if agreed, implement the described changes in small PRs