Maybe you should consider formatting your tags using machine tags.
Machine tags have a namespace, a predicate and a value. The namespace defines a class or a facet that a tag belongs to ('geo', 'flickr', etc.) The predicate is name of the property for a namespace ('latitude', 'user', etc.) The value is, well, the value.
A tag as ifg-1 has not much meaning in itself, but a tag in the format wormbase:gene=ifg-1 has already a lot of semantic meaning, allows for other machine tags in the same style, like wormbase:strain=UL912 or flybase:gene=CG42321, and allows for more precise querrying via the API.