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Organizing vs. searching
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 23, 2006 at 07:25 PM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>In some
>programs if you had an article about Freud you might assign the tags Freud,
>unconscious, seduction.
>
>But later you could not do a search that would bring up only
>those articles about Freud that dealt with the unconscious and seduction.
Daly,
A simple program like Personal Knowbase can do this very thing quite easily. You just assign those three keywords to your article (and any others you would like to add to it). Later, when it is time to search, just select those three words from your keyword list and you achieve the same result.
The problem with PK is that your list of keywords quickly becomes overwhelming… usually longer than your list of articles. The only way to combat this is to use different databases for different purposes, but that, of course, means you have to remember which database you want to search in for a specific item, as PK does not provide for a cross-database search. I’m not an IH user, but its advantage seems to be giving you ways to better organize your lists of keywords (or in IH parlance, categories) so they do not overwhelm you. Still, as Paulo indicated, I become overwhelmed just looking at the IH interface.
Steve Z.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 23, 2006 at 07:54 PM
Paulo, I agree that the interface takes some getting used to.
However, Manfred has recently made what I consider is an elegant improvement by the addition of a category tree on the left side of the window—thus evirtually eliminating the need for the bottom section of the window where traditionally one has assigned categories.
I have found that the more I use IH the more ease I feel with the interface.
I would respectively disagree with your comment re tags—for me the big advantage of tags is being able to intersect them, as well as the fact that you no longer have to think in terms of exactly where do you place an item in a tree.
Daly
Paulo Diniz wrote:
>Thanks Daly, but i already knew MDE Infohandler.
>
>It is a huge of a job considering
>that the author does it alone, but i really don’t like the interface…
>I have a reason
>for that. It’s crowded and cumbersome. Changing from hierarchical to tagging isn’t
>only because you can intersect tags, but mostly because tags have a low ‘cognitive’
>cost, so to speak. If the interface makes it hard instead, you lose a big reason for
>using tags.
>
>Maybe i just didn’t get it the first time. I’ll download it and test it
>again with more patience… Thanks
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 23, 2006 at 07:58 PM
PK is an interesting program. But you are right about the keyword list getting too long.
IH deals with this by allowing you to group keywords or categories into groups.
As well, IH has some interesting features such as parent/child and master/slave categories that really facilitate the assignation of cateogries.
IH also lets you search across data bases.
It’s of interest to me that the two programs whose interfaces intimidated me for such a long time—IH and Zoot—are the two programs I most use now.
Daly
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>
>
>Daly de Gagne wrote:
>>In some
>>programs if you had an article about Freud you might
>assign the tags Freud,
>>unconscious, seduction.
>>
>>But later you could not do a
>search that would bring up only
>>those articles about Freud that dealt with the
>unconscious and seduction.
>
>
>Daly,
>
>A simple program like Personal Knowbase can
>do this very thing quite easily. You just assign those three keywords to your article
>(and any others you would like to add to it). Later, when it is time to search, just
>select those three words from your keyword list and you achieve the same result.
>
>The
>problem with PK is that your list of keywords quickly becomes overwhelming…
>usually longer than your list of articles. The only way to combat this is to use
>different databases for different purposes, but that, of course, means you have to
>remember which database you want to search in for a specific item, as PK does not
>provide for a cross-database search. I’m not an IH user, but its advantage seems to be
>giving you ways to better organize your lists of keywords (or in IH parlance,
>categories) so they do not overwhelm you. Still, as Paulo indicated, I become
>overwhelmed just looking at the IH interface.
>
>Steve Z.
Posted by Paulo Diniz
Nov 25, 2006 at 11:20 PM
Hi Stephen,
I don’t think that that is the only way to deal with a big number of categories. In del.icio.us, i can quickly tag stuff even though i have more than two hundred tags, because when i’m typing the tags i want to use, there is a guessing mechanism that points to alternatives of possible tags considering what i have already typed and my pre-existing tags. Just as Google Suggest (http://labs.google.com/suggest) does. Also, when i’m trying to find back stuff, i can type directly the tag (or intersection of tags) i want to reach, and this makes me avoid the long list of tags (even though there isn’t a guessing mechanism for this on del.icio.us, it’s still much easier). On IH you can’t do that.
When you create a category group (i.e food) on infohandler, and put some categories inside of it (let’s say: meat, vegetables, cereals, fruits), just to breakdown an otherwise very big category list, you’re losing some value for intersecting categories, because without category groups, ‘food’ itself would be a tag/category, and not a category group. And you can’t intersect category groups, just tags/categories.
I also don’t like the idea of having different files with different categories for different purposes, because the PIM that someday i hope to use is for storing a general knowledgebase, and this would be incompatible by having multiple files. And yet, you lose the ability to intersect in this case.
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>
>The
>problem with PK is that your list of keywords quickly becomes overwhelming…
>usually longer than your list of articles. The only way to combat this is to use
>different databases for different purposes, but that, of course, means you have to
>remember which database you want to search in for a specific item, as PK does not
>provide for a cross-database search. I’m not an IH user, but its advantage seems to be
>giving you ways to better organize your lists of keywords (or in IH parlance,
>categories) so they do not overwhelm you. Still, as Paulo indicated, I become
>overwhelmed just looking at the IH interface.
>
>Steve Z.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Nov 25, 2006 at 11:37 PM
Paulo, you write:
“When you create a category group (i.e food) on infohandler, and put some categories inside of it (let’s say: meat, vegetables, cereals, fruits), just to breakdown an otherwise very big category list, you’re losing some value for intersecting categories, because without category groups, ‘food’ itself would be a tag/category, and not a category group. And you can’t intersect category groups, just tags/categories.”
I think IH gives you a way around that problem. If you want food to be a category, you can have it as a category. And if you want anything you categorize that is a food to show up under food as well as categories you may have for vegetables, meats, fruits, home grown, easy-to-cook, etc. you just make the food category a slave to each of those categories. The when you categories chicken a meats it will automatically show up as a food also.
The slave/master and parent/child category system Manfred provides for IH allows some really neat tricks with categorization.
Daly