| I've gotten some really great feedback and questions from people, which I thought I would share with the group, as I'm sure more than one person was confused by these points as well :o) Questions about Chandler Virtuality Q How do collections fit into slide 13, Chandler Virtuality? Facets are attributes like from, to, status. I believe collections to be items grouped together based upon tags and attributes into things we might call projects. The slide talks about a faceted sidebar on the left as well as a facet panel on the right. I'm sorry to be so dense, but I seem to be missing something about how facets and collections fit into the window. Do you see my dilemma? A Yes this is a hard concept to explain because we're sort of glossing over all of the cognitive psychology and library science stuff about how to best use hierarchies, faceted systems and tags... The slide is attempting to show that our system is a Hybrid that brings in elements of all three systems. We're sort doing a high wire act, trying to exploit hierarchies for the things they are good at.
This is why we only have ever have 2 levels of hierarchies: Kinds and Sub-kinds, Spheres and Collections in the Sidebar and Attribute groups and Attributes. This is why we only use hierarchies to organize abstract concepts:
And why we don't use them to organize user data (ie. tags), which is messy, heterogeneous and changes constantly. Faceted systems in Chandler Which brings us to facets. We've selected 2 facets out of the dozens and potentially hundreds of attributes in the PIM domain and promoted them to be first-class navigation tools in the sidebar: Kinds and Collections... (One of our complaints about facets is that while the occupy the balanced middle ground between over-structured hierarchies and under-structured tagging systems, they are overwhelming to deal with in their own right. Simply put, there are too many facets, so many in fact that most users will have a hard time knowing where to start.) However, there are plans to create a more advanced, more generic faceted browser (something like the iTunes Browser interface) which would allow people to browse their data with a broader range of attributes: including Projects and People. But out of the box, the 2-dimensional faceted sidebar is the most basic UI for faceted browsing that all users will use. An elaboration on collections Collections fit into the sidebar in that they are the things that live in the Sphere trays in the sidebar. (Keep in mind that a user starts out with 0 trays out of the box, but can create and define their own trays over time.) Collections are groupings of items, just like any Tag-based grouping or Facet-based grouping. (ie. All "World cup" items or All "Date received: Today" items). So it's not that Collections are Projects. It's more like, a grouping of items based on the attribute "Project: Foo" can be promoted to the sidebar to be a collection. Similarly, a grouping of items based on the attribute "Date received: Today" could also be promoted to the sidebar as a Collection. So in the end, what does it really mean to be a Collection grouping versus a Facet or Tag-based grouping. Well, not much really. The difference is more cognitive than functional. When people Tag or describe items in terms of facets or attributes (ie. London, Foggy, Weather report OR Author: Mark Twain, Protagonist: Tom Sawyer, Publisher: Harlequin), they are:
It's what we're calling a bottom-up approach to grouping items. When people create and manage a collection, they are doing the opposite:
Ergo, collections are a top-down approach to grouping items. And generally speaking, we've identified the following characteristics of top-down groupings:
Bottom-up groupings on the other hand:
Which is the long explanation for what a Collection is. In Chandler there's really only one-notion of item grouping. What toppings the user puts on that basic notion of an item grouping is really up to them: They can leave it as a tag, add a facet to it or treat it like a collection in the sidebar: whatever it is they need to organize their data as it grows and changes. It's sort of the Grand Unified Theory of item groupings. There's a base particle and all other "particle types" are just different instantiations of the same base particle. This is "as opposed to" the way most other applications model item groupings, which is more of an "either-or" experience: Either you create a Folder or a Search Folder or a Category. And once you've created it, that's what it will stay forever more. On Sep 16, 2005, at 2:59 PM, Mimi Yin wrote:
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