"Smart" Outliners

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 347

Posted by nubuckaroo
1999-09-22 20:26:01

In another forum, in a discussion with Bernie DeKoven on the nature of “smart” or “intelligent” software, we began a discussion on outliners as intelligent software.

Here are some of the ideas that came to my mind about what a next-generation “smart” outliner might be able to do:

1. “Fill Special” is the term used in AppleWorks spreadsheets, Excel has a similar function, I can’t recall the name. I type “Monday” as a topic, type “Friday” as the next topic and click on “Assist” (Newton influence here) and the outliner fills the intervening topics. Similar functionality for other similar list-progressions, hours, months, names of states, continents, congressmen, zip codes, yada-yada-yada. More 3.1 has some of this functionality, but not as “intelligence” per se, you must explicitly tell it to generate days or hours, it can’t interpret from context what to do.

2. In planning documents or brainstorming sessions where action items are being developed, the outliner works in background, watching for keywords and names and generates appropriate PIM documents to correspond to action items - tasks, meetings, calls, etc. using Outlook or Notes or Consultant or Now or whatever. This might make up for lacking an integrated outliner in Outlook and others. At the end of the meeting you could highlight an action topic and click “Assist” and the outliner would present a series of the appropriate forms or records depending on the PIM with the relevant fields already filled in for every action item in the outline.

3. The outliner watches the topics and generates searches of local, network and internet resources for relevant related documents in the background - Sherlock looks like a good candidate for this, it’s scriptable. I think its weakness is it doesn’t search for particular phrases, just the individual words, but I think you get the idea. The results can be placed in a collapsed topic as hyperlinks to the source document, or links to summaries prepared by the search engine, again a la Sherlock, user preference.

4. The results of the searches may suggest additional topics or relationships between different topics which may not be readily apparent.

I think the key thing is that the intelligence must reside in the background and not exhibit itself until called upon. I find most of the “auto-format” and “auto-correct” features in Word intrusive and I turn them off.

Do these have merit? Does anyone else have ideas about what an “intelligent” outliner might be able to do?

Dave Rogers

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