Re: 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: 1884

Posted by ureadit
2004-05-10 09:54:10

To: The two other Steves (or are there more?) and all,

I completely agree with Steve Z’s “take” on the problems with info organizing & retrieval. Grand View’s category/assignment system with its columns and separate category view is helpful as is Ecco’s columns and filtered search. Find and Gather is also useful. In GV the problem with Find and Gather is that if a “find” is a subhead four levels in, the context may be completely unknown. To handle this, many years ago, I wrote a GV keyboard macro to generate a “reverse” suboutline which would have that “fourth level item” at the top, with a cascading hierarchy of third, second and first items.

Three info organizers I don’t recall seeing discussed in this forum are Chandler, The Literary Machine, and mde InfoHandler. Of course, Chandler is in an early stage, but it seems to be very well funded, with hopes of an end-of-year release. An in-process version is available now. I’ve downloaded all three, but haven’t the time to test them out.

Search engines and file indexing are also helpful, but with so many PIMs now compressing contents (because of graphics), search engines and indexing are losing their effectiveness.

“The Brain” has a neat way of displaying data & relationships, but I expect that, as Steve Z said, pretty quickly the relationships/links become overwhelming.

What we’re really talking about here is data mining, and I have yet to see any USEFUL “breakthroughs.”

-Steve C

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