Hierarchies or Networks?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jul 19, 2021 at 09:15 PM

I, for one, can make much more sense of things through hierarchies than ‘flat’ networks, but I understand that reality very often can’t be classified in hierarchical boxes. See D. Weinberger’s “Everything is miscellaneous”.

One approach that I have seen taken by several outliners is the concept of clones, whereby an item can belong to more than one ‘box’. This is often referred to as multiple parents. It is equivalent to symbolic links in the file system, which allow a file or folder to be accessed from several folders.

Another approach is to tag items, and to organise the tags in a hierarchy (rather than the items themselves). As an item can have more than one tag, this solves the issue of complementary categorisations.

BrainTool wrote:
>Does this group have any thoughts or wisdom on hierarchical vs networked
>models? How do you think about the information you store?