Re: [Bug-gnupedia] A Detailed Proposal - Mk I

[Bryce Harrington]

On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Imran Ghory wrote:
> Also maybe we should give each article a directory like structure 
> for instance a linux related article could be in,
> 
>  /tech/comp/software/os/linux
> 
> This would allow users to navigate thorugh similar areas rapidly, 
> and also to break off seperate areas into their own encyclopedia 
> (for instance, for an computer encyclopedia we create a data set 
> which jsut contain /tech/comp/* articles).

Hierarchies are very nice data structures, but as we've all found, they
have significant limits too, and I believe in the case of general
knowledge, such as this, we would run into these limitations often.

For instance, consider a paper on "The History of Greek Architecture".
Does it go under /soc/history/greece/, /arts/architecture/history/, or
/culture/greek/technology/, or something completely different?  One is
probably better than the rest, but I'm sure if I asked three different
people, I'd get three different answers.  

Some solutions that could be offered to address issues caused by the
above:  Indexing, search engines, and cross-linking.  But these are
non-hierarchical solutions.  This suggests that the best solution should
be a mix of hierarchical and non-hierarchical orderings.

In playing with a software system called Wiki, wherein documents of
arbitrary topics are collected and organized, we learned that an
approach is to keep the hierarchical ordering independent of the
article.  The article is stored in a "flat" collection, with a unique
but essentially arbitrary name.  Indexes, TOC's, link-lists, or whatever
other preferred hierarchical scheme can then be generated, with
(hyper)links to the article.  A side benefit is that you have an
unlimited number of potential alternate ways to organize...  If I'm
interested in ancient history, the link will appear under
greek/architecture.  If I'm an architecture buff and want a list focused
to that, then history/greek.  Etc.  The same article is available from
each direction, but is not physically stored in any particular
hierarchical system.

Btw, I've also found that communally agreeing to a standard hierarchy
for storing everything is nigh impossible; organization of one's
information is a very personal thing, and everyone will have a different
opinion of how it should be.  I think this is one of the reasons RMS
(wisely, IMHO) recommended leaving cataloging until later.

-- 
Bryce Harrington  ~  ACME General Purpose Hacker / Designer / Rocket Scientist
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