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: 1926

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-05-18 10:38:01

Now, if the above holds, then the ‘best’ structured way to go about it is to actually try to copy reality’s structures.

Reality is built around networks and the power law.

I think it is a bit of an overstatement to say that reality is organized around networks. Power laws describe some aspects of networks, but there are other laws that describe the distribution of occurrences of other phenomena. Many phenomena, for example, are normally distributed. Unfortunately at this point, it we often cannot determine on independent grounds whether the phenomena are network-like or follow some other natural pattern.

Even if we had a way to pick categories such that their connections with other elements in the designated universe follow a power law, I don’t think that would be the best set of categories to use or that they would correspond to the hierarchies we like to see in outlines. In an outline one typically wants several equally broad categories, not the great disparities in frequency the power laws depict.

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