On Wed, Jun 27, 2007 at 10:38:37AM -0400, Andrew Robbins wrote: > I have also been thinking a great deal > about tables, tags, trees, and types (talk about illiteration!). The > reason I've been thinking so much about them is that every once in > awhile, I'll come up with a new way of converting between one or the > other. For example, unlike flickr.com tags, if there was a primary tag > and a secondary list of tags (and you could tag tags with tags), then > this kind of tag-based system would be isomorphic to a tree-based system > (like directory structure) represented as a folder (representing the > primary tag) containing the item, with symlinks to this item in other > folders (representing the secondary tags). The only problem with this > isomorphism is that tag-based systems usually have an implicit global > namespace.
I've also been thinking about tags and metadata, namely in conjunction with hypervos and web stuff. Currently, the "misc:metadata" type has a property called "keywords". What I'd like to do is change that to a group of vobjects representing each keyword (a/k/a tag), such that vobject that share a tag actually each have a link (pointer) to the same tag vobject, rather than just having a copy of the keyword text in each vobjects keywords property. From there, you could go in all kinds of directions for analyzing tags/keywords, or organizing them into groups, connecting "synonym" keywords to each other, etc. Haven't implemented this but will someday. A conceptual goal for VOS is to use and re-use the core Vobject concepts as much as possible to form different structures that overlap or share the same data, and to be able to apply general tools to different sets of data. > Back to tables, tags, trees, and types. I honestly think that if the > right metadata were available for a given dataset, you should be able to > convert between these representations automatically, so much so that it > should be a UI option when viewing a given dataset. I have already > described an isomorphism between tags <=> trees (assuming a set of > unique identifiers, and a primary tag), and I would like to remind of a > common situation for converting between tables <=> trees, for example ... This is interesting. And it could be done, I think, for any vobject tree. One of the todo items for terangreal (http://interreality.org/wiki/UserInterface) is to incorporate a generic Vobject Editor GUI, which would also be avaliable as a stand alone app (http://interreality.org/wiki/VobjectEditingGui). This editor should have different view styles available that you could switch between. These views could be just a list, a standard collapsable tree GUI, a zoomable visual graph (nodes and edges), etc. A table like that could be one of them too. Reed _______________________________________________ vos-d mailing list [email protected] http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
