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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: 1885
Posted by srdiamond15
2004-05-10 17:46:48
Steve Cohen wrote:
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.
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What we’re really talking about here is data mining, and I have yet to see any USEFUL “breakthroughs.”
I haven’t tried InfoHandler, but I have followed some of the discussions in its yahoo group and read its manual. Its main innovation consists of allowing hierarchies among keywords. I’m impressed that its users are happy, although some daunted by the program’s complexity. It seems to me to be a competent and subtle program, but its strength have been demonstrated primarily in organizing bounded information—collections—not an open-ended knowledge base.
That’s what Literary Machine aspires to—to effectively organize the sort of knowledge base helpful to writers. As much as I can make out from its yahoo group and manual—too long for a casual read—it enhances keywords by allowing conjunctive relations among them to define new keywords.
Since neither Literary Machine nor InfoHandler try to explicate exactly how these innovations enhance keyword indexing, it is possible that they are no stronger than keywords.So my first thought was to assess the usefulness of keyword indexing.
But maybe this degree of skepticism is unwarranted. I haven’t been able to conceive of how conjunctions might greatly enhance keywords, but then I haven’t been very motivated, since the developer’s admission that the program taxes its Borland (5?) database close to its limit is too offputting. On the other hand, I anticipated the usefulness of hierarchies among keywords, and located a program (Karteset) which uses that approach. After that I looked into InfoHandler, because Karteset didn’t allow the reorganization of hierarchies, a fault that has been cured in the current version 1.7.
The simplicity of Karteset may be an advantage, because it should be possible to discern what the hierarchies can contribute. Obviously I have a few ideas about how they can substantially decrease the profusion of keywords, but whether it is workable is another matter.
The other alternative is ADM 3. If I can find the time, I might run ADM against Karteset on the same material. There’s no question that ADM 3 will be the most powerful hierarchical organizer supported on Windows.
The lukewarm response ADM has received puzzles me. I sense I’m missing some defect, but no one is quite willing to articulate it. My initial reservation mainly concerned ease of use, as the program’s modal operation was too confusing. But version 3 remedies that by a simple move, by making the effect of esc univocal on mode instead of a toggle. The main thing I presently regret in the program, I’m ashamed to admit, is that it has an ugly, almost unprofessional, interface and an even uglier name. I don’t know that anyone else shares my aesthetic or would be influenced in their outliner usage even if they did.