Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Category Trees

[Rich M. <rd...@cf...>]

The "Tree of Knowledge Fallacy" has to do with the mistaken belief
that you can put all of knowledge into a single hierarchy.  Anyone
who has ever tried to sort miscellaneous items has run into it:
Lessee now; I seem to have a lot of screws here.  Do I put all of
the Phillips-head screws together, sort by length, or what?

The problem clearly manifests itself in the area of Open Source
software packages.  With FileWatcher tracking some 10K packages,
it is totally unreasonable to believe that any categorization
scheme will fit all packages for all needs.  Politics aside
(my tree's better than your tree...), different sorting schemes
will always be better or poorer for different searching needs.

So, I suggest that we concentrate on things we _can_ control:

   *  unique identifiers

        Each package (and each variant and version of same)
        should have a unique identifier, so that we can be
        clear and unambiguous in referring to it.  This is
        really the same issue as the database folks have...

   *  characteristics

        A package can have any number of characteristics (e.g.,
        keywords) that someone might use to look it up.  One
        form of keyword is the package's position in a given
        hierarchy (e.g., freebsd-ports/devel/pmake).

By explicitly allowing for the presence of multiple category
trees, this method is able to incorporate (or even dynamically
add) any number of categorization methods at the same time.

-r

-- 
--
Rich Morin:          rd...@cf..., +1 650-873-7841, http://www.cfcl.com/rdm
Prime Time Freeware: in...@pt..., +1 408-433-9662, http://www.ptf.com
MacPerl: http://www.macperl.com, http://www.ptf.com/ptf/products/MPPE
MkLinux: http://www.mklinux.org, http://www.ptf.com/ptf/products/MKLP