A Proposal On Organization Of Information System
We are living in an age of information, but sometimes information imposes more burden than benefit. From a user’s view, most information systems including file systems, mail systems and various menu-based systems are essentially organized in hierarchical structures. As information increases, the usability of the systems decreases. The major flaw of this kind of structure is that it only provides a single path to the target information. If a user misses one corner, he will possibly lose his way. This situation could be improved if an information system supports multipath routing. I am going to introduce a practical solution by borrowing some ideas from Gmail system.
Luckily, I am introducing a new method of organizing information. It is kind tag classification system, which you may see in “Excel”. It is definitely true that tag structure doesn't always suffice for our needs. Even though tags are much fewer than information items, they still can overflow. In Gmail's tag structure, all user-defined labels are independent and equal, but as a matter of fact, they are very likely different in their importance, urgency, popularity; some labels have inherent relation; the labels for a given information item vary in correlation. For example, labels like "work" or "family" are more important; labels like "to do" or "exam" is more urgent; labels like "sports" or “film” are more popular if the user is a sports or film fan. It's also desirable that after a programmer uses labels in some materials as "Java" or "C++", those materials can be automatically labeled as "programming language" and “OOP” such that he can later get all programming language-related items or OOP items in one list. Lastly, among all labels for a given information item, one may be more relevant than the others. Taking all of these into consideration, we propose a feasible solution as follows.
• Introduce hierarchical structure into tag structure. That is, we treat tags/labels as metadata of...
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