Is outlining the best free form database organization?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1882

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-05-09 12:07:01

An outline is one of the best ways to organize a lengthy writing or one’s thinking, but is it the best way to organize a free form database? I would like to throw this question out for discussion.

Tree organizers have become the canonical free form database, but Microsoft is said to be moving away from hierarchy in organizing the interface file system in Longhorn. For accessing information, as opposed to presenting it or systematizing it, flat associative forms may surpass hierarchy in ease of use. Why have been your experiences with hierarchical organizers compared to associative ones?

The question is immediately pressing for me, because I want to decide on whether a) to buy a license to ADM and organize professional and academic information in what I think is the most powerful outliner currently available versus b) using a database organized with keywords—Bitsmith’s Personal KnowBase seems to be the most mature product of this sort; or c) use Microsoft’s ultra-free form OneNote.

Hierarchy doesn’t exclude key words. There is no logical reason key words cannot be superimposed on a hierarchical system, which is what ADM 3 (in advanced beta) allows. But while there is no logic excluding key word organization from an outliner, there may be pragmatic basis for a prejudice against such a hybrid. It seems to me one may over time lose track of which relationships one is trying to capture with a hierarchy and which otherwise. Plus there’s the additional time spent in work other than actually writing. Opinions?

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