Organizing information
Contents
Writings
- “As We May Think”, Vannevar Bush1945
- “UpLib: A Universal Personal Digital Library System”, William C. Janssen and Kris Popat2003
- “Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies”, Nayuki2017
- “Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies”, Andy Matuschak2020
- “Spatial Software”, John Palmer2020
Ted Nelson
- “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate”1965
- “Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use”1999
- “A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure”2004
- “A Graph-Theoretic Introduction to Ted Nelson’s Zzstructures”, Michael J. McGuffin2004
Software for organizing information
Associative
- Athens—an open source, local-first Roam Research clone
- Foam—an open source Roam Research clone as a Visual Studio Code extension
- Roam—“As powerful as a graph database.” SaaS.
- Org-roam—“Rudimentary Roam replica with Org-mode”
Spatial
Tag-based
- Boorus. Oriented towards media, not text. There are many. Every booru I have seen identifies files by their checksum, usually MD5. It may be better instead to identify them by a perceptual hash.
- Hydrus—a cross-platform desktop booru with optional server-based collaboration. Stores tags in a database.
- Tabbles—a desktop and Web-based document manager with optional server-based collaboration. Windows-only. Allows chat-like comments on files. Stores tags in a database. Proprietary.
- TagSpaces—a cross-platform desktop document manager. Stores tags in filenames or sidecar files.
- TMSU—a cross-platform command line tool for tagging files. Can expose a virtual filesystem for accessing files by tag. Stores tags in a database.
- AlternativeTo: “Apps tagged with ‘tag-based-file-management’”
See also
- Databases
- Information retrieval
- My directory layout for personal data
- Tags should take arguments