Re: Getting it OUT!

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2036

Posted by ureadit
2004-07-10 15:23:33

1. Obviously, I consider as vital the ability of a PIM to draw together previously stored information using newly defined categorization schemes. Same for boolean and “terms near each other” search functions.

2. If you have no idea what you are searching for, I think you have a problem that machine learning may not help. (I have no idea what the thing some call Bayesian Learning really is. Catchy terms often get used for things having almost nothing to do with the original. Having just used Bayes Theorem on a probability problem involving coronary stent restenosis, I am familiar with the real thing. So I don’t know how well “fully automatic” systems would work.)

Many of us (especially me?) just dump info into a PIM without really evaluating it at the time of dumping. So, the first thing one should probably do, if one is really stumped as to where to begin, is read some of the info one dumped.

Here’s something that might help. A search routine that displays at least several lines before and after a “hit.” It might uncover words or phrases closer to what one wants, and one can then use to search with. I’ve used a number of hard disk search programs over the years. One of the two I prefer is Searchopia (http://www.sunrizen.com). To quote from its help file”

“What is InfoSurfing?
“Are you drowning in information overflow? Take control with Searchopia and surf those waves of files. InfoSurfing is the ability to do rapid, repeated searches using text selected from previously matched files to create a new search criteria. The text you highlight acts like a hypertext link that widens a search to other files or narrows a search within a file. The result is faster, more efficient information retrieval. And now with the new Previous List feature, you can move back multiple search levels to previous lists of matched files. You can even save the search results to disk so that you can continue searching right where you left off.”

One increasingly big problem: Because so many files now contain graphics, the files are often compressed, rendering searches with third-party programs problematic.

-sc

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