ConnectedText versus Ndxcards

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Oct 23, 2007 at 04:53 AM

Manfred wrote:
>>
>Well, not necessarily. You can connect everything to everything, but that
>would make the connections meaningless. It would be the equivalent of having every
>sub-topic in a branch of the outline, appear in every other sub-topic.
> >In fact, you
>impart meaning on the information by selectively connecting things. Novices always
>ask for “automatic linking” or the idea that every topic refers to every topic in the
>whole database.

Yes, I understand that much. What I’m getting at is that it’s _hard_ to be selective with undirected connections. But then, the connections aren’t really undirected, you say:
>

>
>I don’t understand what “undirected link” means either. In the
>example there is a direction from Flowers to roses (or, in this case, from general to
>particular). You can also link back from rose to Flowers (or you could assign the
>category “flower” to the topic of roses, primroses, etc., and have these topics
>automatically listed in the topic flower).

So you’re saying that a distinction exists between connecting flowers to rose versus connecting roses to flowers? A connection from roses to flowers looks different from a connection from flowers to roses? Then I must have misconceived the essence of wikis. You hear about flowers and roses being “linked,” which seems to imply the indiscriminability of direction. Wikis are often lauded because they do not require that you choose which node is superordinate and subordinate. But if connections are directed, such a choice _is_ required (although, as in an outline with cloning, a circular connection is at least formally possible). The item linked from, then, is effectively subordinate to the item linked to. One can assign a semantics other than that of subordination, although I’m not sure what else the semantics (of one-way connections) could consistently comprise.

I interpret a link from rose to flowers as a hierarchy. Rose is designated as subordinate to flowers. (Or the other way around. It really doesn’t matter, the choice being conventional.) A link going the other way, from rose to flowers, makes flowers subordinate to rose, as when—per your example—instances of ‘rose” includes the flower rose and the woman named ‘Rose.’

Am I correctly understanding now that a “link” is actually an arrow, not a line?