Re: An Addition to the List

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2432

Posted by sub
2005-01-05 03:33:46

[Stephen D.: While Idea! and MDE InfoHandler have two distinct kinds of objects, categories and records/info items, UR is monistic, apparently contemplating the possibility that the hierarchies will need drastic revision.]

I couldn’t quite grasp the logic of the above until I downloaded and tried UltraRecall myself. I now see that these are two differing routes taken—in varying implementations- by knowledge organisers: (a) organising a tree of selection criteria/categories that apply to a flat list of items or (b) organising the items themselves on a tree/outline.

Depending on the route taken, different solutions re overlapping groups will be applied: in (a) the same item might belong to more than one categories while in (b) cloning is necessary for the item to exist in more than one positions in the outline.

The (a) route appears then more suitable for organising items that are already there, or created outside the organising program, such as files in a disk, since only their attributes need to be moved around. Route (b) is probably the shortest way to creating a info/knowledge base from scratch, by brainstorming, developing concepts or just note-taking while working on a project. This is what I’ve done with Hyperclip, ending up with a 2,5 Mb basic infobase that I can easily carry around.

Nowadays I need to choose my (a) program, the one that will help me organise numerous files that I just can’t include within an infobase. Examples: media files, PDFs, scanned documents. My initial candidates were Idea! Pro and Concept X7 (which is more suitable for individual projects), currently being promoted under $200. I’ve now downloaded InfoHandler to try as well. In the past I’ve tried Columbus, Cmap Tools, Personal Brain and Mybase, all with individual strengths and weaknesses.

alx

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