Hierarchies or Networks?

Posted by BrainTool
Jul 19, 2021 at 08:37 PM

Hi CRIMPers,
I came across this little corner of the internet when @jimspoon pointed the group to BrainTool[1] (in this thread[2]). I’m glad I did!
I started following @davewiner on twitter recently and understand from his material[3] that an outliner can be understood to be a tool that provides a way to manage hierarchies of information. Standalone outliners died out as hierarchy editors got built into applications. I have been building BrainTool as an outliner that lives in your browser and allows you to create and manage a hierarchy of topics with associated notes and pointers to informational resources.

There’s a recent batch of knowledge management and productivity tools like Obsidian, Notion, Roam etc which espouse a less hierarchical, more networked, view of managed information. They seem to be gaining lots of traction.

BrainTool uses org-mode syntax to store the topic hierarchy and so can readily model a network of links between nodes in the hierarchy, but for now it only supports a ‘forest’ model of multiple top level topics each with a branching set of sub topics.

Does this group have any thoughts or wisdom on hierarchical vs networked models? How do you think about the information you store? Does it really matter if the tree editing and search are good enough?

Thanks for any thoughts.
Tony

[1] https://braintool.org
[2] https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/9390
[3] http://outliners.scripting.com/