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: 1889

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-05-11 17:53:48

I can’t really see having a hierarchy of keywords. I can, however see having overlapping “bins” of keywords, where related key words are in a bin. For example, a bin called “color” could contain red, blue, and orange, and orange could also be in a bin called “food.” Of course, one could then have bins containing bins and use boolean/logical constructs to help restrict keyword selections. Zoot probably does something like this and perhaps also Ask Sam.

I take it the difference between a bin and its contents and a hierarchy is that the bin does not itself function as a keyword. But I can see the usefulness of being able to specify the keyword ‘fruit’ in addition to apples, bananas, and oranges, because it means you might be able to avoid adding words for mangos, pineapples, and apricots, where there are few instances of each. You could cut down on keywords by using ‘fruit’ either as a residual or what in InfoHandler is called a master (to the slaves apple, bananas, and oranges), meaning fruit gets entered whenever any of those do, but for other fruits too.

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