Re: MyInfo 3, Jot+, etc., and the vital need for calendars

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2386

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-12-29 20:51:34

>Stephen, I still don’t understand your point that cloning
>is not only equivalent to a keyword scheme but extends it.
>Guess I’m from the “show me” state, but it sure isn’t a
>self-evident truth to me.-Daly

This was do doubt the place where I should have given an example. I avoided that because I don’t know that there’s any application all participants know. But I’ll use ADM to illustrate.

ADM gives certain advantages to key words and certain advantages to subsumption under outline topics by cloning. The advantage to outline topics is that they are or can be embedded in a hierarchy. The advantage of key words in ADM is that you can do Boolean searches on them.

Because of their Boolean capacities, keywords are actually probably more powerful in ADM’s data base functionality than outlining. If you place a topic in an outline, to get Boolean searches on that topic, you would also have to assign a keyword corresponding to that heading. So at best you have to do redundant labor, and even so you don’t get the full value of the hierarchy in for searching, because you _should_ be able to search a concept at any hierarchical level, and key words are flat. So actually to get the same functionality, you would have to enter a key word for the parent, grandparent, great grand parent, all the way to the top of the hierarchy.

So if you have an outline that looks like this,

Animal
Mammal
Primate
Chimpanzee

If you want to be able to quickly locate Chimpanzee by entering the keyword Primate, you must also enter primate as a key word for chimpanzee. Even then, you can’t do a search on mammal to get chimpanzee. You would have to enter the key word mammal too.

On the other hand if you rely on key words instead of outlining, it might not even occur to you that you might want a broader concept in the keywords as well, because the key word structure, being flat, makes it hard to keep track of the implicit hierarchical relations among the key words.

Now, the way to do this, the way that Idea! does it explicitly and the way that UR probably will be able to do it in the future if he user wants to set it up that way, is probably self-evident. You should be able to drag chimpanzee to any point in the outline with the control key held down to create a clone, and this should automatically give you keywords corresponding to all the hierarchical classes that subsume chimpanzee.

I say UR may get this capability because it is a logical one to have and the developer seemed receptive. But as things stand you cannot form Boolean searches from outline heardings. (UR uses the term “key word” in a different sense, as including all of the non-trivial terms in a document and any the user wants to add for searching.)

Stephen R. Diamond

Back to archived message list