Re: Is outlining the best free form database organization?

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 1883

Posted by zeoli
2004-05-10 05:03:46

Stephen,

Thank you for bringing up this topic, which seems central to determining the effectiveness of an information organizer. I have struggled with it over time, shifting my interest back and forth between the hierarchical and keyword approaches. The problem with the hierarchical approach, in my opinion, is that I find that my information tree grows quickly and soon is overwhelming. It also requires you to put only one major qualifying assignment to any one item—the node under which it resides.

So I tried Personal Knowbase, which is attractive in many ways. But I quickly found that in order to use that sort of system effectively, you need to give each item many keywords, and my list of keywords was soon longer than my list of items. Also, you need to anticipate how you will want to classify items well in advance of actually retrieving them, sometimes not easy to do. The context of the information may change over time, but you can’t easily go back to your information and reclassify it to suit a new interest or project that you didn’t anticipate when you were adding the information to your database.

I have found that Zoot allows you to both use a hierarchical approach and a keyword approach. Its lack of text formatting limits its usefulness, however. InfoSelect uses a hierarchical approach, but also has a great search capability that is pretty speedy and efficient, so finding information is a snap. It isn’t so great for allowing you to uncover unexpected relationships in your data.

So I haven’t found the perfect solution yet. I had some hope for ADM, and maybe the new version will come through. I did try a beta edition of version 3.0 and I wasn’t as thrilled as I’d hoped to be, but maybe I didn’t explore it enough.

Keep us posted as you learn more about ADM, should you decide to try it.

Steve Z.

Back to archived message list