Hello!
I attach to this mail a draft paper about organizing browser bookmarks
and, in general, many kinds of collections of lots of items that can
belong to some cathegory.
In short:
- it is noted how hierarchical cathegories induce an order of
importance between the many qualities of an item
- it is noted that this ordering is not always meaningful: mutt is a
mail client with a console interface, but there is no clear way to
tell if its "mail" quality is more important than its "console"
quality
- it proposes to avoid this ordering by tagging the items with all
their qualities in the form of an unordered set: mutt can be tagged
with {mail, console, net} and evolution with {mail, x11, net, ...}
- it shows a method to convert such a tagged collection in the
hierarchical organization we are used to work with, adding the
desirable property that the resulting hierarchy has some nice
navigation properties.
I find that this way of organizing things could fit well both to Debian
package sections and to Debian menus.
In particular, applying it to package sections is trivial from the
developers' point of view, since it just involves to maintain a
larger dictionary of tags and allow Section: lines in control files to
specify more than one, as in:
Section: mail, console, net
Existing packages would already be valid with the new organization, only
they could benefit some more detailed sectioning.
I have a working C++ implementation of the mapping algorithm (developed
for XBEL bookmarks) available under GPL license (though I still have to
put it online) and I'm available for discussing the idea.
Bye, Enrico
--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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@Article{evn,
title={Effective View Navigation},
author={Furnas, G. W.},
year={1997},
booktitle={Proceedings of CHI'97},
organization={ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
c-address={Atlanta},
pages={367--374}
}
@Article{autoorg,
author={Yoelle S. Maarek, Israel Z. Ben Shaul},
title={Automatically Organizing Bookmarks per Contents},
url={http://www5conf.inria.fr/fich\_html/papers/P37/Overview.html}
}
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