[Mak-developer] Call for Requests- Knowledge Association Layers

[Jared R. <ja...@wo...>]

[Citation date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 14:40:57 +0100]

>>>>> wildatheartx == wildatheartx  <wil...@gm...>

    wildatheartx> These is the problem where Knowledge Association
    wildatheartx> Layers should deal with.  You have a bunge of nodes,
    wildatheartx> which you want to connect.  You can connect them. In
    wildatheartx> the first Layer by author in the second layer by
    wildatheartx> epoche.  So if you choose one of the different
    wildatheartx> layers, you can see the nodes, with only the
    wildatheartx> connections between them you inserted in this layer.

This is to-a-large-part implemented with Ted Nelson's [1] ZigZag [2]
structure, which using "dimensions" as your layers.  There is a
sourceforge project for a Java open-source implementation called
gZigZag [3].  gZigZag is very actively developed.

Your library-categorization problem is the example I use as well when
I'm trying to discuss hierarchical versus non-hierarchical
structures.  The other way to approach the problem is using "tags" or
what I call the "multiple-keyword controlled vocabularies" approach.
You have a number of vocabularies, such as authors, category, rating,
etc, and each resource (the book, for instance) is tagged by zero or
more keywords from each vocabulary.  Then you can search through the
information space easily, by picking just one of the vocabularies as a
starting dimension.

I have a simple implementation of a bookmark application [4] where
each bookmark is tagged by one or more keywords from flat category
list, but it lets me take nice slices through my database easily, for
easy retrieval.  I used to have large bookmark lists in my browser,
but the hierarchical structure gets annoying quickly.

It would be amazing to have a multiple-dimensional "mindmap" with some
of these characteristics but the details of making it workable make my
head hurt.

[1] http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/
[2] http://www.xanadu.net/zigzag/
[3] http://www.gzigzag.org/
[4] http://www.wordzoo.com/bookmarks

-- ja...@wo...

"One cannot mark the point without marking the path."