Hi, On Sunday 22 March 2015 19:37:23 Francisco Carriedo Scher wrote: > I would like to share an idea about a feature and get opinions from you.
you gave that good though and came up with a lot of interesting aspects. Those thoughts are not new, things along that line of ideas have actually been discussed often before... What I personally learned over the last decades in IT is that all approaches to find "a better" or even "the right" hierarchy or structure to organize ones data are senseless. There is no such thing as "the right". That is always in relation to a situation, or purpose or whatever. In short: it changes, it depends. So why do it? Sooner or later you will always come to a point where suddenly your shiny structure is not the best any more. Where instead it annoys you. And you start to make crude "workarounds", we all know these. Things like additional tags are fine, but only another workaround if used as a secondary means. I think one of the reasons for this is that humans simply are not meant to work and think in such strict structures. It is against our nature, against all our experience and mental tool collection. Humans can adapt and obey the rules of a strict structure. But that is hard work, not intuitive and only works for a certain percentage of everything there is. Instead humans act in a more associative or even semantic way. They are able to be flexible and switch the point of view as suitable for a given situation. That is how we should store things in our extended memory these days, in computer or cloud storage. So I say: Let's FINALLY kill file hierarchies! Let's free ourselves! Revolution! Instead of selecting a specific location in a strict tree where we already know in advance why we so often fail to find something again, why don't we save things the way we would do it intuitively? By the associations we have to the thing we want to save? Dates might be one association, but certainly not for all things we store and certainly not the only associations to same things. So why ignore all the rest, although it is obvious that it is valuable? What would make sense is to have File Save/File open dialogs that don't even mention a location in a file system. That is up to the storage system, I am not interested in that. And the system might even want change and optimize that in background, I do not care. I want to be able to pick relations instead, or call it tags, does not matter, for each object. Many such tags. Nothing against additionally adding automatically chosen tags, but manual ones are more valuable. It is not only that I can search by tag later, but the tag association *is* forming a hierarchy by which files are stored and a very intuitive one. And the main twist: I can chose different points of view, a different hierarchy, so look at different trees by which a collection is organized *without*having*to*reorder*things*. It is multi dimensional per definition. Required for that is: 1. a good and growing tag collection, consisting of hierarchically organized tags defined by means of an ontology, 2. a means to keep such collections synchronized, so that separate collections can be mixed and will still make sense. So probably a central authority for the tag ontology from which one can clone and branch ones own private and local tags and 3. the replacement of the file save dialog. For this I could imagine offering both variant side by side for different purposes, that way a smooth transition would be possible. So a dialog with two tabs, one offering to pick a location in a hierarchical file system, one offering to save by means of ontology. This would be a complete separate project because the tag collections should be synchronized. I named that idea "syntags", gave a few talks about it. Most people agree on two facts: absolutely makes sense and a long way to go :-) But who if not a project like owncloud could be a driving force behind such a "revolution"? Christian Reiner (arkascha) _______________________________________________ User mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.owncloud.org/mailman/listinfo/user
